She put her finger in the air.
"By the way," she said, "I want my name to be Patricia once I"m dead."
She stood up.
"And then I say, "It"s what I was wearing at the time, Bunny Friend!""
"I"m dead and I still have to be Bunny Friend?" I asked.
"Okay, you can be whoever you want. But, whoever you are, you have to get excited, jump up and down and stuff, and say, "Why have you no underwear on, Patricia?""
To be dead, according to Laura, you had to be on a bridge, and you had to have no underwear on. She would tell me that she didn"t listen to her mother, that it was her mother"s rule never to get in the car without any underwear on, in case you got in an accident, and then you"d be stuck around on the road all day, without any underwear on, and be really embarra.s.sed.
"I was in a car accident," Laura said. "That"s why I"m dead. See my scar?"
I told her I didn"t think we should play anymore. I suggested dress-up, reading on the balcony. But Laura was too wrapped up in the imaginary scene.
"Okay, so you see me on the bridge, and I say, "Wait! Stop right there! I"m coming to you!" And as I walk to you we eat leaves that are really made out of sugar, and when you are dead, it"s always a race against time . . ."
"But why? We"re already dead."
"Oh, you can die a few times. I forgot to mention that. Once you die more than three, no, four times, you are officially dead forever. Anyway, so, the water is rising over the bridge, and it"s getting in my ears, and I hate that, because it could lead to a forever infection, and at the last second, you pull me out of the river!"
I told her I was having difficulty imaging the landscape. She ignored me.
"And then," she said, "I say, "Are you honestly going to tell me that nothing new has happened to you since you"ve been dead?" And that"s when you say, "It still feels really new to me, Patricia.""
And that"s when Laura started to get annoyed because she said I wasn"t playing right. She asked me why I wasn"t speaking, why I wasn"t playing along. I told her I couldn"t. I was dead.
"No, you"re not really dead," she said. "You are only fake dead. Don"t you get it? It"s just a game."
Laura was getting fl.u.s.tered. Her cheeks were pink, and she looked like she was going to cry the way she cried when she couldn"t sleep at night, a tired, overwhelming cry, exhausted by the length of one night.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, it"s just a game. So what do I say next?"
"Never mind," she said, and started to walk away to the other room. "I"ll play by myself. You are like the worst fake dead adult ever."
I tried to apologize for this, but she had already turned the corner.
I followed her.
"Laura," I said, concerned, thinking of all the ways I could possibly tell her that my father was not her real father. That she was in Europe all alone with a bunch of strangers, that her only family was back in America, part of it buried in the ground. How weird, I thought. I could explain to this girl exactly what it looked like to watch her father die, his head crooked and his hands still. But what I said instead was, "Where did you learn this game?"
Laura was on the ground, petting Raisinet"s underbelly. "Mark," she said.
The dog was silent. The snow fell harder outside.
"Raisinet," Laura said. "Shhh. Raisinet is dead. But he still has two more lives left."
I put my ear to Raisinet"s stomach and when he didn"t move, I decided I would never, ever tell Laura the truth because the truth was that this dog was dead. The truth was this girl was overwhelmingly alone, more alone than I ever considered myself as a child, and I didn"t want to suddenly become the stranger who made her put her ear to the dead dog and listen to the silence.
"Take him away," Laura cried. "I don"t want to sleep with that dead thing in the house."
"Okay," I said, brushing her bangs. "I"ll take it away."
"Far far away," she asked.
"I promise," I said.
I sent Laura to bed. "Promise far far away?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. Laura closed her door and I looked for something to put Raisinet in. I found one of my father"s small-sized suitcases and placed his body in. "Good-bye, Raisinet," I said, and when I closed the lid, I started crying. The room was dark, the way it gets dark after no one bothers to turn the lights on while the sun sets. I decided to give it one last try and called Jonathan at the hotel. He actually picked up.
"Hi," he said.
"Let"s go to the bone church," I said to him.
I waited for my father to come home and sat on the couch with the dog in the suitcase. I practiced breaking the news to my father: "The dog is dead," I said aloud, but it didn"t sound right, so I added, "Dad, the dog is dead," and that didn"t sound right either, so I said it in Czech, "Pes je mrtv," and that didn"t sound right either, because in Czech, nouns could be masculine or feminine, but they could also be separated into living and nonliving, and so maybe it was not grammatically correct to still call the dog the pes because part of being a dog is being a dog, and it was now more dead, more mrtv, than it was a dog.
By the time my father arrived, the truth didn"t sound right in any language, so I just said it.
"Dad," I said. "The dog is dead."
"Where is it?"
"In the suitcase," I said.
"Why the h.e.l.l is it in the suitcase?" he asked.
"I promised Laura I would go bury it."
"Now?"
"It doesn"t feel right to fall asleep knowing the dog is in the living room, dead."
"I suppose not," he said, sitting down. "I suppose not."
He had questions: did Laura know (she was the one who found him), was she sad (about as sad as she got before she was forced to shower), how did it happen (like everything), well what does that mean (at some point, his heart stopped beating).
29.
At the hotel, everything was different. Snow was piled high outside, and Jonathan was awake at the kitchen table. My legs were goose-b.u.mped and cold.
"Heat"s not working," he said.
The heat had been off since the middle of the day when the pipes froze and the temperature inside the room had dropped to fifty degrees. He called the front desk and they said they were working on it, a repairman was coming. We looked out at the tiny world covered in snow and as far as we could tell, there were no streets or people or things to say. The repairman was surely out there, somewhere else, never coming. Jonathan was across the room. The doornails were dead at the hinges. The dog was heavy in the suitcase.
"Where have you been?" I asked him.
"Here," he said. "Reading the paper."
Something about him was off. He looked broken. Like a wire in his brain had snapped. Like he had been staring at a plant for too long.
"A whale randomly exploded in Australia," Jonathan finally said, picking up the American newspaper on the table. "Scientists are still speculating."
I opened the window.
I put the suitcase on the table. "What"s that?" he asked.
"It"s the dog," I said. "The dog is dead."
"Emily Marie," he said.
When he was sorry about me, sorry for coming to Prague, sorry for ever sleeping with me in the first place, he liked to use my full name as an imperceptible method of scolding.
"We have to bury it at the bone church," I said, holding up the suitcase.
"Now?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
He looked at me like I was crazy, but we covered ourselves in our winter coats and hats and got on the tram. Jonathan was acting weird, like he thought I was weird, so I tried to lighten the mood. I told Jonathan that at Apropos Restaurant that morning, there was a sign above the vent that would have made him laugh. It said something in Czech, with the English translation underneath, DO NOT COVER SPIRACLES OF HEATING.
"Is "spiracle" even a word?" Jonathan wanted to know. Before I could say, yes, dumba.s.s, it"s an external tracheal aperture of a terrestrial arthropod, before Jonathan could laugh and pull me into him, the undercover tram officer heard my English and wanted to know why Americans never thought they needed permission to be so dumb.
"Jizdenku," the tram officer demanded, like, ticket.
The tram police in Prague were like a secret police left over from an expired Communist tradition, dressed casually in jeans and fleeces, riding the trains silently like they were just another tourist, and then flashing a gold badge.
"Jak se mate?" I said back, and I was learning from cla.s.s that only an American would say this since when the Czechs heard, "How are you?" it was like, well, my mother"s getting married and she needs to find a dress, and she will, I"m certain.
But not the tram officer. He did not even hear me.
"Jizdenku," he said. "Or off tram. Or seven hundred koruny."
Jonathan and I looked at our empty hands. I couldn"t find my tram pa.s.s. We stepped off the tram.
The first thing I noticed was the depravity of the situation. This was a trick my mother had once taught me. The snow was thick on the ground. My shoes were wet. A beggar was in a blue hooded sweatshirt kneeling in front of a yellow Lab that had a rat on its back. The rat was wet, rubbing his nose with his paws. The beggar had his cupped hands outstretched and was so still, his shape looked like a pipe that a careless pa.s.serby might decide to smoke. This was the traditional way of begging for money that I had seen all over Prague.
"Do you think the beggar trained the rat to do that?" Jonathan asked. He was so shamelessly American, the way he said beg-ger, the way he a.s.sumed this man was homeless only to be amusing. And the poor yellow Lab, I thought, no weapons, no money, no coat in this snowstorm-merely the instinct to kill. "Ruffski," Jonathan said, staring down at the yellow Lab. "Ruffski!"
The dog sniffed at my suitcase.
"Isn"t it weird that to be homeless in the Czech Republic there are still all these rules to follow?" I asked Jonathan, and I thought that if I was going to answer a stupid question with a stupid question I could have made it a more efficient one, like, Jonathan, why don"t we just go back to the hotel? How are we going to get to the bone church at this hour? Or, Where were you? Why can"t you just love me in a regular way?
Instead, I said, "Like, you can"t just be homeless and poor and beg, you have to sit in this uncomfortable position all day long and you are still poor and begging, but really uncomfortable."
Jonathan shrugged.
"Let"s go get highski," he said.
We wandered through the city until we located Cafe Red, an underground bar where we could buy weed and smoke it right there. On the way, we walked through the streets. We were tourists who laughed at street signs. All the men in the street signs wore top hats and all of the little girls wore bows in their hair, bows that made them look less like pretty little girls and more like hybrids of children and bunnies.
"Hey, there"s the underground bar," I said, pointing to Cafe Red.
"Why do you keep saying "underground bar"?" Jonathan said. "What"s so f.u.c.king great about an underground bar? It doesn"t become cooler the farther underground it is. Like, n.o.body says, "Hey, check out my fourth-floor restaurant, it"s so cool because it"s on the fourth floor.""
We walked down the stairs. A black man with long dreadlocks was behind the bar, asking us what we wanted. "What you want?" the man said, and I noticed the Jamaican flag pin on his shoulder. "What you want?"
"Weed," Jonathan said. He turned to stare at the tall woman in the corner of the bar, her long blond hair like a sheet of ice melting down her back. She was beautiful, dancing, slowly moving her hips to the sound of nothing. She had her eyes closed as if she could not bear to watch her own body communicate, as if her subtle movement only validated the inarticulate murmurings of the drunk foreigners, who, she understood, were n.o.body. Watching her made me feel like nothing. Watching Jonathan watch her made me feel worse than nothing.
"f.u.c.king Americans," the Jamaican said. But we got what we wanted.
We sat down on the seats. Jonathan put his hand on my leg so fast, I felt like part of the scenery, like the leather upholstery of the chair underneath him. He began to roll the joints.
"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ, this is worthless s.h.i.t," Jonathan said after his first drag. "We"d be better off with oregano."
"Like that guy is even from Jamaica," I said. "It"s f.u.c.king Disney World here."
"Like, hey, what part of Cleveland are you from?" Jonathan said. We both knew it was a joke, so we didn"t even have to laugh. Jonathan was the only person who ever understood me like this, and he used this as leverage to get what he wanted.
I put the joint to my lips and apologized to Raisinet in my head. I felt the burn in my lungs and the panic rise to my diaphragm and I couldn"t be sure that I wasn"t choking. We sat in the booth for what felt like an hour, then Jonathan said, "Let"s get the f.u.c.k out of here. Let"s go find that bone church."
"We just got here," I said.
"Emily, there are chandeliers made out of peasant bones and that"s something to see."
"I know that," I said. "I was the one who told you about it. And I said it exactly like that."
"All right, then, why are you fighting?" he said. "Let"s go to the bone church."
But I was tired. I inhaled and thought: We are never going to find the bone church. How exhausting. The poor dog.
I didn"t move. And Jonathan didn"t stop staring at the blond woman while muttering, "Ruffski." Jonathan didn"t think I could hear him. The burning oregano was regulating my breath, and I thought it was possible that I had never properly breathed until this moment. My stomach extended, and the smoke burned my lungs, like an old newspaper on fire, quick to light, quick to burn out, then: ash and I felt gone. The Jamaican from Cleveland had returned to our table, his face hovering in the smog around us. I couldn"t tell if he was on fire or if the place was on fire or if n.o.body was on fire at all but me. "What you want?" he asked. Jonathan waved his hand for the man to go away.
"Nothingski," Jonathan said.
There was a man I presumed to be French staring at me from the other side of the bar, sitting under the long red fluorescent light that read: OBRY DEN, like, good day, like, this is what it looks like when the Devil says h.e.l.lo in the morning. The presumably French man winked. I could barely move my mouth to explain the urgency of this to Jonathan.
"Why do you make Shakespeare references when you haven"t actually read much Shakespeare?" I asked him instead.
"I don"t knowski," he said.