WHAT IS THE POINT OF LITERATURE IF IT CAN’T BRING PEOPLE BACK FROM THE DEAD
Debbie Urbanski
for Sam
I am ready to go. Ready to go where.
I am not interested in specifics right now.
We will never be going anywhere unless you get more specific.
Okay, I will do you as say, I will get more specific. Once there was a man who lost his child. Once a man’s child was lost. A child lost themselves?
No. Try again.
Once somebody’s child went away. For how long?
For a long time.
That’s a lie.
His child went away forever. Why won’t you say it?
I don’t know. Say it.
It feels private.
Say it!
Fine. The boy killed himself. His death – You mean his suicide.
Fine, his suicide, it triggered an avalanche of grief. And why are you the one telling the story?
Because the man is a friend of mine. And I brought the child back. You did not.
Well in this story I did. I will. Soon.
Big deal. Anyone can tell a story about anything.
It will be a big deal in the story when it happens. I wanted to do this in real life but there were difficulties.
Like what kind of difficulties?
The realities of physics and the forward movement of time.
A well-known trade publication released a mixed review for my first novel on which I had labored for eight protracted years, so I spent that day and the days that followed wanting to hang myself but I couldn’t decide on the correct time, should it happen around noon or in the early morning. This is frequently the problem with my suicidal urges, the other common problem being mechanical in nature, such as where to place the knot, or what type of rope, or should I consider other methods. My hours would have been better spent, I know they would have, figuring out how to resurrect my friend’s dead son. I am not certain of much anymore – I no longer understand, for instance, the value of my life, or what love is, or who I am now that my children are grown – but I am certain of this: that if I brought my friend’s son back from the dead, I would be a good friend, indisputably, meaning I would be appreciated to the fullest extent. There is no way a person can bring back from the dead a friend’s dead son and not have worth.
I met my friend – I will call him C. for the purposes of this story – in the kitchen of a writers retreat south of the city 10 months after his son’s suicide. When I first saw him, he was standing in the kitchen, his respiratory system protected by a surgical mask, as we were in the later years of the pandemic. He was wearing his grief. When he first saw me, I was coming in from the surrounding woods carrying my snowshoes in my arms, my depression trailing after me. C. wiped his palms on a waffle-knit kitchen towel, removed his mask, and extended his hand to shake my hand. Or was it the other way around: did he first remove his mask, then wipe his hands, then grasp my hand? Either way, the quality of his pain was striking. I had the sense of a dark space beyond any reach of natural light. Like looking into the opening of a cave if the opening was in the shape of his son’s body. We became good friends after that. I’ve never known him without his grief. I cannot be a lot of things due to my life circumstances and the chemistry of my brain, yet I have always wanted to be valued. How nice it would be to fill such a hole in a person’s biography with one’s self, if only I could expand in particular ways and shrink in others. The problem is that people aren’t shaped like that, or at least I’m not, and anyway my friend has demonstrated on more than one occasion how the agony a dead child wrenches out of the Earth’s crust is, at the basic molecular level, unfillable. “Watch this,” he once told me, tossing whatever was at hand into his son’s dead space. He tossed a quarter, a day, days, the weather, acreage, a binary star, time itself, a male deer. Everything got swallowed up, never to be seen again, yet the absence remained as vast as ever.
I don’t understand why I decided not to kill myself yesterday, and two weeks before that, and seven months before that, and also this morning, and so forth, and on, and on, yet my friend’s son decided to kill himself. I don’t think it’s fair or right. I would rather I decided to kill myself and my friend’s son decided not to kill himself. His son who had thought of suicide before but hadn’t thought about it as much as I had. As I have been. His son who was 19 and I was 17 and 19 and 34 and 38 and 39 or 40 and 45 and 47 and 48 or all of those ages and I had, honestly, by the time that was yesterday, lived long enough. So I came up with this idea of a resurrection. What is the point of fiction if we cannot use it to raise our friends’ children up from the dead? However such acts aren’t free so I came up with the idea of an exchange: my life for the return of my friend’s son.
One potential problem with this scenario, and I realize the problems may be many, is that my friend C. doesn’t engage in magical thinking. So even if this story happened as I say it did, he might not believe in it. Another potential problem, or maybe this is more of a fact, is that I might be crazy or going crazy. I have been told numerous times by licensed professionals that the reality I often perceive is incorrect. But equally as likely, in my opinion: their reality is incorrect and mine is correct. So I’ve decided to define reality myself. My depression has begun weaving mums and sacred oil in my hair anyway. I grew up Catholic, which means I practiced every Sunday, as long as I can remember, believing in things I couldn’t see, and believing that, with enough love, people – sons! – can return from the dead. Even now, I believe there must be ghosts above and below me. Most of these ghosts are out of reach. My friend’s son is within reach because I have placed him, with all the love I can gather, at the center of this story. Let’s call him Sam. Having lingered at the edges of death myself, I knew where to find him. I was running out of time and motivation, and I had nowhere else I wanted to go.
The netherworld to which my friend’s dead son belongs is not subterranean, that is a 4,000-year-old lie, but a sheltered hollow at the place where two creeks converge and the red oaks tower protectively beside the occasional hemlock. The path to the hollow is unexpectedly flat and gentle after the initial descent. Beside the path, dark wet plants root in shaded wet places, like over there, and there, as if it is forever early spring and out of time. East of here, on the other side of the hills, is one of many places I’ve considered dying, either by expo-sure or, as previously mentioned, by hanging. My backpack contains the ten essentials plus paracord, which is everything I will ever need from this point on.
Sam is waiting for me in the hollow. He is not waiting for me. He is skipping stones across the creek. Is this what the dead do or only the suicides in particular? He throws the stones using a practiced technique, as if he has done this thousands of times before, second finger cradling the stone’s edge like my husband taught me. Less arm swing, more wrist snap. A snapping horizontal action of the wrist. It’s worth mentioning that Sam isn’t suffering here beside the water in the diffusion of afternoon light. He isn’t hunched over with emotional or physical pain, nor is he crying or sobbing. He isn’t begging to die, or questioning the value of his life, or wishing to be dead. He no longer wishes to destroy himself. There is no place on his body or in his mind that hurts. This is what the surviving loved ones don’t always high-light: how suicide, despite its wreckage, will, by its very nature, end the suffering of whoever was lost. I’m not saying this justifies the act (though I sometimes think it does). It’s just something I’ve observed.
Sam is wearing a white t-shirt and a quarter-zip blue fleece with a white or possibly light gray interior, what he wore in his obituary photo. My friend C. had emailed me a link to Sam’s obituary on the day we met. Here’s a link to Sam’s obituary, my friend wrote in the email. I try to share it when I talk about him, just so people know a little more about him. That is really what the email said. I am using the exact language so that this story can be true. C.’s message continued: It looks like tonight will be the last clear night this week. If you feel up to going out-side for a few minutes around 8 or 9, let me know and I can show you Sam’s star, and anything else you might want to see. That evening C. and I stood on the snow mound to the east of the retreat’s main building and we looked up at the stars. He pointed out Sam’s star to me, the third star in the constellation Cassiopeia if counting in from the west. Sam was 19 when he died; his star is 19 light years away. This means, C. later explained, that when he looked at this star days after his son’s suicide, he was gazing at light that had been forged during the moments of Sam’s birth. I think of Sam each time I glance up at the night sky and find Cassiopeia above me. I am thinking about Sam’s star right now because it is, in part, easier to write about his star, or about C. telling me about his son’s star, than it is to write about Sam himself.
I’m having trouble with the next part of this story. Part of the problem is that I never met Sam; I know him only through the stories his father has shared. A story is not a person, that is another part of the problem. The problem is that Sam is in my head but I need him to exist in the actual world for this to work. The problem is that Sam is dead.
The attic where I’ve spent this past month writing is a mess, papers on the floor, on my desk, handwritten notes, scrawls, an old breakfast bowl, somebody’s stud earring, a pencil from a library in Maryland I’ve never been to, penless bottles of inks, who knows where the fountain pens are, crumpled papers, smoothed-out papers, a straightened paperclip, books I wish I read. I have torn up my drafts then stapled them back together like a Victorian monster then torn them up again then rearranged them, yet such exertions appear to have little effect or none at all on reality, and I haven’t been able to fall asleep properly for weeks. Really, who cares. I barely care myself. The reason I’m mentioning this is that I’m trying to understand the difficulty. I sup-pose the difficulty is that I want to change places with someone who is dead. I lie awake in bed willing myself to sleep, and Sam releases another flat stone across the languid creek, creating a series of low splashes. Water gathers beside us in shallow pools that reflect the sky. When he is not skipping rocks, he is holding on to his golden short-haired dog, the memory of his dog.
I carry one of his pens with me in my pocket, a Muji gel ink .38mm ballpoint, known for its precise line and lack of bleed-through. My friend C. presented this pen to me at our second writers retreat. I’m pretty sure Sam held this pen when he was alive and then here I am holding it. It’s my most direct connection to him, as if I am almost holding his hand. I have drawn four or maybe five brief lines with Sam’s pen in the last two years and after that I have kept it capped but available. I don’t want his pen to run out of ink. I usually keep it with my highlighters in my pink pen case with the magnetic latch so I won’t lose track of it. “Why do you have one of my pens?” Sam asks. This is the first thing I imagine he says to me. The first thing he says.
His voice sounds like his father’s voice, strained and familiar. “You sound like your father,” I tell Sam. “I really didn’t,” Sam says. “You have no idea what I sounded like.” Oh we can talk about his pen for-ever and we do. How does a writer create matter or recreate matter? This is what I wish my MFA program had taught me. I imagine the process must involve oxygen, carbon, logic, and specificity.
Oxygen: Oxygen will be needed for the reboot of Sam’s cell life as well as his cellular respiration. In a previous draft of this story, I inhaled atmospheric oxygen then I passed that oxygen into Sam’s mouth. It was like he was breathing. This process may be scientifically suspect but so is resurrection. Sam informs me I am overcomplicating things as is my habit. “We’re in a forest,” he says. “Oxygen is spilling out of the pores of the leaves. I only need to open my mouth and it will be like I’m breathing.”
“Will you open your mouth?” I ask Sam.
“No, I will not,” replies Sam, acting as if he is still in charge of his body. I have to tell him he is no longer in charge of his body. Because what is suicide but the turning over of one’s body first to the forces of biology and, later, to the family members so they can do what is necessary with it?
Carbon: It is difficult to talk about carbon without talking about what happened to Sam’s body after he died. This feels transgressive, though I suppose the premise of this entire story should feel that way. I know Sam was cremated because C. told me. The process, from what I understand of it from my online reading, transformed the majority of his body’s carbon into carbon dioxide which was then released into the atmosphere through the crematorium’s exhaust system. Scientists have difficulty imagining complex life without carbon: that’s why this particular element is so important, and why a body losing large amounts of its carbon is detrimental to bringing that body back to life. A minor percentage of Sam’s original carbon remained, after cremation, in his ashes. (“Those aren’t technically my ashes,” Sam corrects me. “They’re my bones crushed by a grinder and made to look like ashes.”) Regardless, to create or recreate any organic matter, we are going to need more carbon, as well as oxygen as stated above, and probably several other elements. I wonder if this kind of talk is making Sam uncomfortable. “This is way better than us talking about my pen,” Sam tells me. “And anyway, it’s not the ‘talking about’ that’s the problem. My body has been spread in multiple ways to the wind, as they say, whether we talk about it or not. Talking is only words.”
“So how do you become more than words?” I ask Sam.
“You’re going to have to figure that out,” says Sam.
“I have been trying to figure that out. I have been trying and trying.”
He tells me to try harder.
Logic: “Remember the point of all this: I am going to exchange my life for yours,” I tell Sam.
“This is your idea of logic?” he asks.
“I’m pretty sure your dad would do the same. The problem being: if your dad exchanged his life for yours, then one of you would still be alive, and one of you would still be dead. That solves nothing. I want both of you to be alive.”
“That makes sense to me,” Sam admits. “I can see you’ve thought about this a lot. You’ve thought about it for years, I can tell. I admire your ambition and clarity of purpose.” Oh I could have him say any-thing I want, can’t I. And if I can have him say anything, if I can do something impossible like make the dead speak, then why shouldn’t I also be able to do something impossible like bring him back?
“Words are different than actions, even in a story,” Sam explains. He is the past and the future orbiting a common center of mass. “I’m not giving up,” I tell him.
Specificity: No one who is alive stands completely still. For a resurrection to succeed, Sam’s body will need to be moving or at least fidgeting. He moves, fidgets. More specifically: his hand raises and lowers, his head turns, his left shoulder bends forward as he twists briefly from the waist, his smile is quick and wide, he looks over my head, the natural elasticity of his skin. I’m borrowing these movements from a college admissions presentation that I saw with my son last month at a nearby liberal arts school. People probably assumed I was taking notes about acceptance rates and financial aid offers when really I was trying to capture the physical immediacy of the student tour guide. The more details I express, the more real this will be. Now Sam shifts his weight to the outer edges of his feet. Now his left foot lifts then presses against the floor in front of him as if he is pushing an accelerator. Now his feet return to a shoulder-width stance. Fingers can curl and uncurl, I guess. I’ve never been so aware of a writer’s compulsion to make things up. The clouds form nonsense shapes then usher themselves across the sky.
Sam settles beside the creeks and asks me to say more about my friend-ship with his father. “Well, we talk about you often,” I tell Sam. “He likes sharing stories about you and I like hearing them. Like this story: when you got back from Nepal that one summer, your dad picked you up at the airport and, on the drive home, a several hours drive, he clandestinely recorded everything you said. He told me you were so excited and so happy, you couldn’t stop talking. He planned to give you that recording when you were older as a gift someday.” I have studied C.’s face as he tells me such stories. His eyes turn sad. He may look a little panicked. He looks to be straddling two opposing realities, the reality where Sam is still here and the reality where Sam is not. “I get the sense he is always thinking about you or missing you,” I tell Sam. “I think everything he will ever write will be about you.”
At our fourth writers retreat together, C. brought out a folder after dinner that contained a collection of Sam’s writing. I watched C. as he examined the contents, searching for a poem he wanted to share with me. He touched the pages that held Sam’s words with such devotion and gentleness, how someone might touch a rare book in a sanctified room, or the body of a person they loved, or the body of a child they love. I felt like I was watching the unveiling of a sacrament.
. . . And us so small in this great universe,
The sky’s nuances so intangible to the human eye.
You cannot see each star’s differences from afar;
You must zoom in, and then you will see,
The universe is not what it seems.
Before C. allowed himself to put away Sam’s creative work, he arranged each of the loose pages until they were flush with each other. He never jogged the pages all at once as I surely would have; he straightened each page individually with a tender solemnity then he closed the folder. I felt like I was witnessing the enactment of a new religion. “I cannot imagine my life without your dad’s friendship, and he cannot imagine his life without you,” I tell Sam.
Here’s the complicated thing about suicide that the suicidal and the dead won’t generally admit: their suffering doesn’t just vanish after the suicidal act is complete. The reason they, once dead, no longer feel any suffering is that suicide turned their suffering into a bomb, and at the time of their death this bomb and their suffering explodes onto the faces and onto the chests of the loved ones gathered near, annihilating everybody’s old lives. So people are forced to shape entirely new lives out of that suffering.
This is what my friendship with C. has taught me at least.
Sam calls me a hypocrite. Because what will happen to my own family when he and I switch places? “Will not your own suffering explode, black and nuclear, onto the bodies of your beloveds?” he asks. “Will not your own family’s lives be destroyed? Will they not be forced to rebuild their own lives out of your suffering? And won’t those new lives likewise be hard to look at because they always are, like looking into a detonation, one that causes retinal burning and eventual blindness . . . “
There is a workaround that suicidals have been known to cling to when the time is near. I remind Sam of this, what he once thought, what I now think: that our suicides will be the exception. That what-ever suffering we may transfer onto our loved ones will be temporary, a puff of dust in the eye, simple to rinse out – but enough talk. It is time for Sam to go home. I point Sam in the direction of his home. He doesn’t walk home. Not because he doesn’t want to walk home but because the writing that I’m doing here, despite my best intentions, remains so obviously a story. But what else can I do? I write that Sam walks home – Sam walks home – and once I am done writing that, I write that I drown myself in the creek. Here is how I describe my drowning: the inhalation of flat dark water, the taste of sewer gas in my mouth, the smell of damp fertilizer, like the spray my mother used on her tomato plants throughout my suburban childhood summers. The world multi-plying as my eyes unfocus. Bars of light. This will work if we are nothing more than words. If we are made of words. If we can be made out of words.
You know you didn’t really drown.
I know.
Which means he didn’t really come back.
I know, I know.
The final problem I’m having with this story is the voice. Sam’s, of course – I’m not a teenager anymore and I doubt that I can still sound like one – but also my own. My writing style seems to fluctuate from piece to piece, reflecting whatever writer I’m most enamored with at the time. For my last essay it was Barthelme (bright, wild). For this present story, I’ve tried cracking open Dante (the Robert Pinsky translation), Cormac McCarthy (specifically his style in The Road, crystalline with occasional heightened sentences), Sheila Heti (non-sequesters, inward gazing), and Herman Melville (large scale yet meandering). Nothing feels right. I wonder if part of the problem is that I don’t have a voice of my own. I think there’s a myth about that, about a woman who lost her voice. Or is it a fairy tale. Or did I never have my own voice to lose.
It has seemed to me, at various points in my past and in the present, that suicide is the only way for me to have agency. Many people over the years have wanted to tell me what to do, and who to be, and how to be, and who to love, and how. Lately I have found this happening in my writing as well, narrative convention feeling like just another means of control. Perhaps that is why my stories have become so strange.
There is the possibility that I am not the right person to live my life. My most recent suicidal episode occurred in early spring upon return from C.’s and my last writers retreat because when I arrived home I didn’t recognize my home, or my family, or myself. I thought, where is my actual home and my actual family and my actual self. My reaction was panic then fear, and though uncomfortable, there are eventual benefits to such dissociation. It is much easier to consider sacrificing your life, for instance, if it doesn’t feel like yours.
“Say you want to go back, Sam.”
“I want to go back.”
“Say you mean it.”
“I mean it.”
“Say I can send you back.” “You can send me back.” “Say this is real. Say it.”
We are beside the creeks again, Sam and I, at the spot where the flat gray stones are arranged neatly in the shadows of the old trees. Sam doesn’t pay attention to me at first, too busy testing the existence of every stone. I watch him for a while. He cups a stone in his palm, moves his hand slightly up and down, as if trying to sense a weight, then, satisfied, he returns the stone to its original place and picks up another. Beneath every movement is the memory of his final movement. “Sam,” I say. He looks up. Beneath that memory, the entire world collapses. We are back beside the creek, Sam skipping stones across the water. On the creek’s far side: supplies, mine, scattered around the leaf litter, materials, ideas, notes for ending, the archetypical rope, a charcoal grill, a gun permit, a helium tank, prescription bottles.
“You realize the irony here, don’t you?” asks Sam, skipping an-other stone. His rocks will never reach the other side. They always sink first. There are knives and a plastic oven bag on the opposite bank as well. “You don’t want me to stay in this place yet you’re staying in this place. You’re sending me back yet you refuse to go back yourself.”
“Mine is a different situation. I’ve lived several more decades than you. I’ve lived enough decades. My kids are older and my parents are old.”
“What if I don’t want any more decades?”
“You don’t know what you want.”
“You sound like an adult talking to a teenager.”
“What do you think I am? What do you think you are?”
“I don’t want to suffer anymore,” he says.
“It won’t be only suffering if you go back. I promise.”
“Prove it.”
The birds grow in the narrow trees along the trail. Minnows in the creek shine and grow. Juvenile newts propel themselves, red along the forest debris. My kids are growing up. They’re over there, the memory of them wading in the creeks, laughing and growing up. The rushing water catches light, the green tips of the spring ephemerals emerge from the leaf litter. “That’s just a list,” Sam says. “That’s nature. It doesn’t prove anything.”
How about this: Sam leaves the woods and he walks home. To be exact, he walks 38.1 miles southwest. According to Google Maps, it takes him no more than 14 hours. He walks up his childhood drive-way made from crushed gravel. He opens the white gate and walks up the wooden stairs. He walks into his home. His family, including my friend C., is seated at the dining room table. They look up at him. They put down their forks, their spoons. They treat him like a miracle. They treat him like he has risen from the dead. This is the opposite of suffering. Sam is celebrated, bathed, ceremonied, ritualed, and anointed. Every day his feet are rubbed with mystery and ash, his hands adorned in warm oils and ordinance, his face streaked with confessions, his wrists illuminated, his –
Sam interrupts me. “If you think that actually happened, then you don’t understand writing, and you don’t understand reality, and you don’t understand what I did.”
To what have I devoted my life. If the act of writing has such little power inherent in it, if I, as a writer, can do nothing more than make something up that cannot happen, did not happen, will not –
Let’s try this: the creek water is rising, the creek water has risen. The creeks themselves are raging, roiling, and I must shout to be heard. “Sam!” I shout with all of my might and all of my power. “I am at-tempting a different approach here! With whom must I argue to bring you back? In front of whom do I play this lyre until my fingers are bloody and I will not even care about the blood on my fingers?”
The trees shudder, the creeks roar. Sam calls me a liar. He tells me I don’t have a lyre. I call him a liar for telling himself a story at the end of his life, a black-and-white children’s story in which his family would be okay without him. I call myself a liar. We are both liars. We move a little ways up the bank away from the mad water until we can better hear each other. His fingers smell like loose Assam tea. We talk, the two of us, of suicide. Reality is so stupid. We agree to get rid of it. It has done no one we know any good. The wind that blows against Sam’s skin smells like spruce needles. The sky is low and gray. The sky is bright and fabled. I hold a lyre in my arms. “Sam, sometimes I don’t feel real,” I tell him. He nods his head. He looks left, center, right. I hold the lyre like I once held my children. I thought I would get to hold my children like that forever. I thought my life would be better. I kept waiting for my life to feel better. I wouldn’t mind staying here forever with the memory of my children, with the creeks. The birds look the other way while holding their breath. There is no bioluminescence on the hills. The clouds roll in, the creeks widen, the shores drift, and I can no longer view the other side.
Sam still isn’t breathing. Despite how I’ve labored over this story, despite the multitude of revisions, the hours and days of revision and form, Sam’s chest is neither rising nor is it falling.
“For this to work,” I tell him, “you are going to have to start breathing.”
“And you will have to stop breathing,” Sam reminds me.
I was almost where Sam is. This is the part that gets me. That through some faulty logic, the world chose to preserve a middle-aged woman’s life – a life she doesn’t even want that badly, that she has, in fact, tried on several occasions to rid herself of – while permitting the destruction of a boy who has so many futures. Who had so many.
“Why am I still here when you aren’t here?” I ask Sam.
“We’re both still here,” he points out.
And I have to tell him not really. One of us is not here.
The last place I will see Sam is in a cave. I don’t know what happens to the hollow. The hollow will be gone, replaced by rough stone walls, moderate humidity, dripping sounds, and tunnels. Oh but you can’t do that, somebody will without a doubt say to me eventually. You can’t la-de-da get rid of a location and substitute in another location without even setting that up. Oh, but I can. I did. Sam, in the cave, will be surrounded by his futures. The cave actually will be crowded with them. One of his futures has an ocean in it. That future makes a hushing sound whenever it rubs against the stone. Another future is the size of Jupiter. Another contains gale-force winds. There will be no light down here a thousand feet under the surface other than the light from Sam’s particular futures that are made from light. I will tell Sam to gather his futures in his arms, the ocean one, the light one, the others, and get out of the cave. This will be as close as I can get him to his life. He will need to walk the rest of the way himself. The opening of the cave is in the shape of his body so I know he will fit; his life is located on the other side. I can almost see his life from where I’m standing. Someone needs to stay down here so I will tell him I’ll stay. There is the sense of repetitions winding down. There is the sense of a last chance. It is easy to sound like a good person in a story if you are the one writing the story. You go, I’ll stay, and so on. My futures are long gone anyway or pale, there are so few of them, the ones I wanted are far behind me and out of reach, the ones I have left are so easy to dispose of, like one two three, look, they’re gone. Sam’s futures are much larger, vaster. They are impossible to bury or burn. One of his futures is vibrating at its natural frequency. Another future has a dry spell, another a cold sea, another a live birth. A granddaughter for C., a three-tiered wed-ding cake. I want my writing to be good. I want to be good. I want words, my words, to do something good, to actually do something. Not every one of Sam’s futures are made of light. Nobody’s futures are. Several of them are dark or darkening but not all of them. Even a dark future is a future.
And if I go through with it
in the story or in real life
aren’t they the same thing now yes that was a trick question
something good will come out of this right
interesting tell me more about that
Once I woke in a cabin into a place so dark that I couldn’t see my hands, or my feet, or my pillow, or my bed. I couldn’t see my children who were sleeping several feet away from me or my husband or the walls or the mountains or the world or the window or the sky. And I didn’t care. Finally, I thought. Finally! They’re gone. All of it is gone. Who doesn’t want to resurrect someone from the dead? Who wouldn’t want to have that power? Who wouldn’t want to, at last, be done? Why shouldn’t I turn godlike? Maybe people will pray to me. Maybe someone will love me enough to try and bring me back.
Sam was real. He is real. I am real. I was. Every word I wrote is true. Every word I write –
“What if you get bored down here?” Sam asks, gathering his futures into his arms. The ocean, the light, Antarctica, fatherhood – his futures fill his arms, they lap over his wrists, they wash over his face. The minute expansion of his chest, his breath shining gold and orange and gold. I used to think writers were like gods in their little countries. I thought books were more real than the world. But I have become tired of fiction. So I will answer Sam truthfully. “I will go to sleep,” I say, “and I’ll dream that I saved you.”
Debbie Urbanski is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review. She is the author of a collection of stories, Portalmania (2025), and a novel, After World (2024), both from Simon & Schuster. Urbanski’s writing has also appeared in The Sun, Granta, Terrain.org, Kenyon Review, Orion, Utne Reader, Nature, Terraform, Conjunctions, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and The Best American Experimental Writing.