Turn Back
He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Yes, she was barely twenty-one; yes, she was a little drunk; and yes, she had the terrible habit of falling hopelessly in love with (and never speaking to) at least one member of every indie band she saw play in a half-empty bar. But she had never seen a man like him before.
It wasn’t his face, not exactly (though it was pretty, all sharp lines and soft smiles). It was the way he held himself: his back straight and shoulders just the slightest bit hunched. It was the way he cradled his guitar and how his hands tenderly clutched its strings. Every note a discovery. Inventing the songs as he played.
She stared at him the entire set.
He stared back.
She hoped the dim lights of the bar hid her flush and that he didn’t think she was some horrible superfan. Maybe she could blame it on the beer.
<><><>
He found her after his set and sidled up to her at the bar.
(Her friends, taking the hint, peeled off to buy another round.)
He wasn’t as tall as she’d thought. He took up space differently onstage, like the sound of him expanded to fill the room. He was so small standing there, in front of her, his hands stilled and his eyes blinking. His cheeks were a blood-and-beer-flushed pink, and his nose was almost lazy in its crookedness. They stood at nearly the same height, but his hair gave him some advantage, thick and curly and just a little overlong. She thought of those old Classical statues of heroes: Perseus with the head of Medusa; Apollo with his many, many stringed instruments.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey.”
“That was great,” she said.
“You liked it? Really? I was so nervous—it was all stuff we were making up on the fly—could you tell I was nervous?”
“Not at all.”
He smiled, and her heart broke preemptively. It was the kind of smile that would destroy her eventually; might as well get it out of the way now.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Eurydice.”
“That’s pretty,” he said. “I’m Orpheus.”
That, of course, was the beginning of the end.
<><><>
She carried him with her for the next week in secret smiles and surreptitious laughs, between classes, in the library stacks. The shape of his mouth as he laughed at her jokes, the warm flush of her cheeks—from alcohol, from a hopeless crush, from both. The way he’d laid his hand on top of hers and asked to see her again sometime soon. The way he’d written his number for her in thin, spidery writing on a cocktail napkin, like the guys in the movies.
“Do you remember the guy from the bar the other night?” she’d say. “The guitarist. The one with the curly hair and that stupid jacket.” And her friends would smile and say of course they did, she wouldn’t let them forget, she should call him already. And she’d say no, no, it wasn’t like that. He was so far out of her league they weren’t even playing the same game.
But she found herself painting his hands. They could have been anyone’s; hands were hands. Knuckles and fingers and palms, a few calluses, some freckles, some scars, chipped fingernails, maybe a bent middle finger. To “know something like the back of your hand” was bullshit, because, if it came down to it, could you really tell your hand apart from anyone else’s?
His hands were in perpetual motion. They held music in her deliberate swaths of oil paint, pale blues and burnt reds, all smudgy and soft. They cradled the neck of a guitar in a way that could only be playing his set from the bar. It was a rough approximation from a single half-drunk memory, and she didn’t realize what she was doing until she’d done it. Before the paint could dry, she threw the whole thing away and called him.
<><><>
Their love story started with a song. It started with “just drinks” which turned into “just a walk in the park” which turned into them sitting on his little apartment balcony, barely big enough for the two of them, and him strumming at his guitar. She sang along tunelessly.
Eurydice loved music, but she’d never been good at it. She had a musical mother and one of those fathers who thought anything other than total and abject success was a failure. There was no enjoyment, only mastery. Eight years of piano lessons had seen to that, when her teacher had finally given up and quit on her. Anything beyond a scale just refused to take. Even years after, she still wouldn’t play a single note.
He was charmed by her off-key duet, or that’s what he told her. He’d spent too much time with capital-M Musicians who took the whole “art” thing too seriously. She had a naïve wonder, a glorious inhibition. There was no shame there, just joy. Or maybe it was the bottle of cheap wine that lay half-drunk between them.
“Write a song about me,” she said. “No one’s ever written me a song before.”
“Okay,” he said.
And he did. He made it up as he went, plucking chords in the shape of her name. As she watched, she realized how wrong her painting had been. His music wasn’t the heavy permanence of oil paint, it was pastels bleeding down her front.
Eurydice.
Eurydice.
Eurydice.
It was wordless, and then it wasn’t. It was a structureless mess: no verse, no chorus, no bridge. It was the most perfect song in the world.
“I love it,” she said, and she kissed him.
<><><>
They lost a weekend to each other. Their phone batteries died, and they didn’t care, because no one out there needed to reach them.
They had Thai food from the place down the block that he swore had the best Panang curry in the city, but also a one in five chance of giving you food poisoning if you ordered wrong. (They ordered right.) They had his shitty little sofa, which he’d bought used from someone on the internet, and it whined and tried to stab you if you sat down too fast. They had a music collection that would make an indie movie weep, and they took turns quizzing each other: name the song, the artist, the album, the year. They impressed each other with how many they both got right. She tried to do that horribly domestic thing of making eggs in his kitchen, but she was a terrible cook, so they had coffee instead.
On Monday morning, tangled in the bedsheets, his calloused fingers tracing symphonies on her arms, he told her he loved her.
<><><>
Eurydice realized she had never been in love before. She’d been on first dates, she’d watched enough movies, and she’d read enough “Modern Love” columns to be pretty sure she knew what she was in for. Her parents said they’d been in love once, but they’d all seen how that ended. Nothing accounted for the specific peculiarities of a man so gentle, so beautiful, so strong that he could reshape the air of the city to sing her name.
Eurydice, sang the taxis rushing past.
Orpheus, the clouds echoed back.
Eurydice, came the chant of the subway car.
Orpheus, whispered the wind in the tunnel.
Eurydice, cooed the pigeons roosting in the park.
Orpheus, replied the ducks in the pond.
He built the city for her. He made and unmade and remade it. The Theater District was his gift to her, the harbor her lullaby. She had so little to offer in return.
He was what music journalists called a promising artist. He was, he told her proudly, entirely self-taught, all instinct, never needed training. She was training as an art historian, nothing instinctual about it—but a year out from a graduate degree, she’d assumed she’d make the home stretch. But, she realized, she didn’t want to study oil paintings. She wanted to study him.
School fell away. Classes didn’t matter anymore, and the job she kept at the campus art gallery became an afterthought. Her friends all told her they liked Orpheus, really; they just missed her—but their voices were flat and brittle after his.
Her professors worried about her, too. Her advisor emailed to ask where her thesis outline was; her proposal had been so promising, but she didn’t know how to reply that the only art she wanted to study was a young musician on the North Side without sounding like a high school cliché.
She took him to museums and showed him the Old Masters and Pre-Raphaelites and Roman statues. He told her she was more beautiful than all of them combined, and she laughed because she knew it wasn’t true.
<><><>
They were happy in a way people were only happy in songs and paintings. They were happy in a way that seemed impossible. Like it couldn’t last. Like it shouldn’t have even begun in the first place.
(Maybe, they sometimes wondered, it was because they were both children of divorce, and had to prove their parents wrong. Love worked in stories, in art, and they were both artists, weren’t they? They’d learned what to do wrong, and so they’d learned what to do right.)
They were happy when his band landed a recording contract and his following on social media started to grow, and four months after they locked eyes in a dingy little bar, they moved into an apartment with a balcony that could fit the two of them and a smug, codependent dog.
They were happy when she told her university, no thank you, she didn’t need to finish pursuing her degree, and started painting full-time. She redesigned all his band’s merch, and he said he’d never seen a tour logo so beautiful before. She knew the shirts were good, and so her old work—portraits and dreamscapes and half-finished collages from back when she’d thought she’d need to tell stories on her own—lay asleep under their bed.
They were happy when, on a winter trip to a rocky New England coast, scarves wrapped around their necks and fingers stiff with cold, he knelt down in the shadow of a lighthouse, and she knelt to join him, crying, “I wanted to do it first!” The bitter wind and icy sea echoed the sounds of their yes, of course, I will far into their depths, and she was sure the fish at the bottom of everything could hear them.
<><><>
They were happy when they stood on that same coast six months later, her in a white linen dress, him in shirtsleeves. She wore white snapdragons in her hair; his suspenders were dotted with music notes. She told him they were the ugliest thing she’d ever seen, and that he’d never looked more handsome.
They had a small wedding: their parents and stepparents, his band, and a few of her friends from the days before their world had shrunk down to each other. The smug little dog, of course, was the ring-bearer, and they exchanged simple bands filigreed with delicate flowers. Asters and lilies and heliotrope and honeysuckle and, on the inside, a single forget-me-not. Just in case, she’d said, when they’d had them made. Just in case, he’d agreed.
Everyone said it was a beautiful wedding, they were a beautiful couple, they looked very happy together, and they wished them both a long and joyful marriage. They were sticky with summer heat and salt air, and the crash of the ocean did its best to hide how hollow their well-wishes were. When they thought the bride and groom out of earshot, they all gave it a year.
<><><>
They danced on the rocky cliffs until long past the night had gone dark and the moon had turned it light again. Their arms wrapped too tightly around each other to eat, despite all four mothers and stepmothers fretting about how thin they looked and how beautiful the cake was and how they couldn’t let any of this go to waste.
Finally, one of the women coerced Orpheus away to at least try the crab cakes, they were extraordinary, leaving Eurydice to stand alone with the stars.
The ocean lapped at the foot of the cliff so many stories below. It had lain silent to hear her husband’s music, but it returned to its duty as soon as he stepped away.
Husband, she thought, husband—what a beautiful word, all hers, all hers. If she listened closely, it almost sounded like his voice. Like it had bottled up his songs and stored them in its seashells, where they would be safe and immortal.
Eurydice, it sang. (Orpheus, she whispered.)
Eurydice.
Oh, it sounded just like him.
She stepped closer.
Maybe it was the champagne, maybe it was her heels, maybe it was the way her new husband’s laughter stole all the air out from under the wedding tent. She wobbled a little on her feet.
Eurydice.
Closer.
Eurydice.
And closer.
Eurydice.
And —
EURYDICE.
She would have liked for there to be something beautiful after that, but there was just the falling. There were rocks and there was air and there was salt and there was ringing and shouting and echoing and pressure and floating and splashing and gasping and blue and green and gray and black.
There was falling.
There was her husband’s face above her, in front of her, behind her, below her.
There was nothing.
<><><>
You weren’t supposed to follow a wedding with a funeral. The bridal pictures weren’t supposed to debut beside a casket. They were supposed to go online: to be liked and shared and cooed over by second cousins who “wish they could have been there!” and thought you looked “beautiful xo!!” They were supposed to be framed and hung in your hallway, and then maybe relegated to the living room bookshelves when you replaced them with pictures of the children you’d have someday.
But there she was, snapdragons in her hair, her wedding-day smile welcoming guests to the graveyard.
She didn’t have a headstone yet, because if she did, then this was real. Then she was really there in the ground, sodden and still. Then she was never coming back.
She had made all kinds of news, first local, then national. Till Death Do Us Part?: Up-and-Coming Young Musician’s New Wife Tragically Dies on Wedding Day.
His band’s sales skyrocketed. His apartment was still. The dog lay on her side of the bed, whimpering, waiting for her to come home.
He stopped playing music. She wasn’t there to hear it.
<><><>
Children like to ask where they go when they die. Adults know better than to expect an answer; they just buckle down and try not to think about it too hard. Some religions might tell you they know for sure, and maybe they do, who’s to say. Belief is a very powerful thing. By the time you’re down there, anyway, you probably won’t remember enough about what you expected to tell if it met your expectations.
For the purposes of this story, Eurydice fell, and she kept falling.
Down and down and down and down, far below the surface, below even the bottom of the sea, until she couldn’t tell you where she was, not even a little bit. It was a little like children on the beach actually, finally digging the hole deep enough to reach China.
Eventually, she awoke to silence. She wasn’t awake, because she hadn’t really been asleep; it was more of a murky near consciousness. Her senses weren’t really senses but the scrambled and backwards and upside-down idea of senses. It was the rough shape of being alive drawn by someone who only distantly remembered the experience.
So, this was what being dead was like.
She stood in what she could only think to call a long hall, though it wasn’t really long and it wasn’t really a hall, because shape and space weren’t really things here. Neither were words. Not the way she was used to them, or the way she tried to form them in her head. They sort of squished and jumbled and melted together into a new language that was not a language but the absence of language altogether. It was shapes and colors and the slick of oils on her skin, if she still had skin; it was a meaning made from nothingness, and barely a meaning at all. It was, she thought, in that new not-quite-thinking way, not entirely unlike painting.
At the end of the not-long not-hall was an old-fashioned ticket booth, like the kind at the state fair her parents took her to when she was a little girl, back when they were still pretending that this whole family thing was working out. (The kind she’d stood in front of years later with a man she loved, showing her father the new family she was building in place of the one she’d last had at the top of the Ferris wheel.)
The state fair—what was a state fair? An idea of lights and sounds and smells and laughter, but it slipped away as soon as she had it. All she had was the memory of having a memory. The idea of parents was getting fuzzy, too, and moving farther and farther away the longer she squinted at it. Probably best not to remember here then, lest she forget.
She didn’t walk to the booth, not exactly, but she was much closer to it, then directly in front of it. There was a shadow inside, sort of something like a human silhouette. She had the distinct impression that it was sizing her up.
They stood and stared at each other for some time, and then a light on top of the ticket booth pinged yellow. A paper ticket appeared on the ledge, and she stared at it. It had what looked like a number on it, but she couldn’t read it. None of the lines or shapes made sense to her, only danced around and taunted. All she could make out was a little square of yellow in its middle.
She stared at it longer.
The ticket didn’t say anything. Neither did the shadow.
Finally, she took the ticket, and a gate she hadn’t noticed before swung open. She wondered if it had been there all along, or if it had unfolded itself from the nothingness just for her. (What power, to be liberated from the technicalities of physics.) An old-fashioned wooden roller coaster car parked beyond, its lap-bar raised and side-doors open. No track below, just darkness.
She stepped in.
Please keep all remaining limbs inside the vehicle, said a voice that wasn’t a voice.
She complied and neatly folded her hands in her lap. The doors closed, the lap-bar lowered, and she had the vague memory of the clicking loading sounds these cars were supposed to make.
She thought, for a second, that she ought to be afraid of it. She was pretty sure she used to be afraid of this kind of thing, but she couldn’t remember why. She wasn’t so sure she had a grasp on the idea of fear at this point, or what this kind of thing was at all. This was where she was meant to be going, and so she went, calmly and quietly and without a fight.
The car didn’t move, but it didn’t not move, either. It all just sort of was, and it all sort of wasn’t, until she was aware that its doors had opened, and she was no longer entirely alone.
She was in another hallway like the first, but it wasn’t a hallway. It was longer and wider and deeper, open to an endless blackness. She could just make out the faintest suggestion of a purple-gray sun. Shadows trudged around her, packed so tightly they overlapped. Some were smudgier than others—the worn, smeary outlines of the echoes of people. Some were more nearly human, just faded and fading. If she were to guess, they were newer. Wind and water and time hadn’t eroded them yet.
There should have been a great cavernous wailing, but it was quieter than that. More like the gentle hum of rocks set deep in the earth.
The sea of them gathered her up and pushed her onwards, onwards, onwards.
<><><>
Orpheus stopped playing music.
It should have ruined his career, but, instead, his profile soared. People loved a good story: the beautiful young musician, whose music had made the skyscrapers and the garbage trucks and the sidewalk grates weep, had gone silent. Shut away in his gilded tower with an anxious dog and a ghost. A modern myth, a cautionary tale, a host of magazine profiles for which he “was not available for comment at this time.”
When he knew no one could hear him, not even the dog, he sat at his piano and tried to remember her song, the one from their very beginning.
It began with her name.
EURY—
What was it?
He knew her name. It was on the marriage license and the news articles and the backs of the framed pictures he kept on his bedside table, but his fingers couldn’t spell it. Anything approaching it turned tuneless and dull. The music itself refused to call out to her. That’s silly, it said, you can’t speak to the dead. They’re gone.
Was this heartbreak? he wondered. Was it grief? Was this how you were supposed to mourn?
He realized he could no longer remember what she looked like in motion. He had still images of her, playing in a slideshow. Her head thrown back in laughter. A frown, her face smeared in paint. A closed-mouth smile. On the beach with the dog on her lap and a seagull moments from attack. He didn’t know how to string them together. She existed in frames of time, not the moments in between. He played her voice messages to him to make sure he didn’t forget her voice entirely, too. Once you started forgetting, that was the first thing to go.
He kept her snapdragons on the kitchen counter. They had washed up with the tides, salt-crusted and stiff, and he had wrapped them delicately in a handkerchief for that long, endlessly still ride back to the city. He supposed they were long dead, but there was still a purple to them, if he caught them from the corner of his eye. The stems held their last gasps of green. She’d chosen them, he remembered, not for meaning, but for shape. She’d liked the way their little mouths hung open as if they had something to say.
When he walked past them to get to the fridge, they sang his name. He wanted to tug on their little beards and stick his finger into their petal mouths and feel her pressed up against his hand, but he was afraid to break them.
When his mother then came over to bring some chicken soup and a heaping dose of self-pity, she tried to throw his wife’s snapdragons out with the empty Thai takeout containers that had mushroomed across his kitchen, and he yelled at her. Actually yelled, all guttural and ferocious. They both cowered at the sound; neither of them had known he was capable of that noise.
“It’s all I’ve got left of her,” he said and crawled into his mother’s arms.
“I know, baby. I know.” She wrapped him tightly and let him cry against her shoulder. She didn’t tell him how badly he needed to shower or brush his hair or change his clothes or clean his apartment or at least, for the love of all that was holy, open the blinds and let in some sunlight, or any of the many things she wanted to tell him. She let him cry.
And then, thinking of self-help books and parenting guides and sappy TV movies, she said, “There’ll always be a little bit of her inside of you.” She tapped his heart. “Right here.”
“What do you know? You’re divorced, not widowed.”
She went back to letting him cry.
He cried for a very long time, until, one day, he stopped.
You can’t go on like this forever, everyone told him, because the hermetic melodrama had long since gotten old. You have to learn to live without her. People die, Orpheus. What happened to you is terrible, but you have to keep moving. She isn’t coming back. The world’s still turning, and you’re still here.
They were right; he couldn’t go on like this forever. Their dog was miserable, and so was he, and the piano was long out of tune. His voicemail filled up, but he couldn’t delete her old messages to make way for new ones.
They were right that he couldn’t go on like this forever, but they were wrong. This wasn’t living; this was a horrible waking twilight between alive and dead. It was going through the motions, but just barely. It was waiting, waiting until it was all over, waiting until he was ready, waiting until she walked through the door and called him baby and they fell asleep tangled in each other’s heartbeat.
<><><>
It wasn’t very hard, being dead. It was kind of cold, and a little damp, but it mostly just felt like forgetting. Eventually, you would forget what you had forgotten, then that you had forgotten, and then that you had ever been anything at all. That, she surmised, was when you were little more than a smudge.
There were so many of those smudges here, and so many clearer shadows. They were kind to her. They stroked her hair and stood beside her as she learned how to breathe this new air. They didn’t speak, because no one spoke here, but they listened to her as she learned that they had all lost the capacity for language. Their presence implied that they had all once been through it, too. Maybe they couldn’t remember what it was like, but that core human bit at the center of even the smudgiest of smudges had some understanding. Death wasn’t a very original experience after all.
They didn’t occupy their time, because there wasn’t any time, and they didn’t occupy it. They mostly milled and floated and forgot. Sometimes one would recognize another, or who they used to be, or maybe once were, and it would feel a little less cold and a little less damp, until they went back to floating.
She was looking for one shadow in particular. She didn’t know who or how, but it would be a beautiful shadow, slight and soft and gentle. It would have the most marvelous hands she’d ever seen, and the strangest, most inquisitive mouth. She thought the word husband, but she didn’t know where it came from or what it meant, and it slipped from her grasp as soon as she found it.
She held onto the tail end of it. -Band.
The heavy, cold thing she wore around her finger.
Band.
Husband.
There it was again, light and slippery. A husband was something she once had that made her very happy. She was missing it now. Where was it? What was it? What had she called it?
Her husband must have had a name. She remembered that much: that most things had names, though she couldn’t recall her own.
Husband. -Band. Husband. Band. Band. Music. Musician. Melody. Oh—
<><><>
It would have been their wedding anniversary. She would have stood next to him in that little polka-dotted sundress that he loved, her hair whipping free of its braid. They would have had good champagne and cheap supermarket brie and kissed each other until their lips were swollen and red. It was the paper anniversary, fragile and malleable like young love. Their marriage could be folded into a bird or cut into snowflakes or curled into ash.
Today, he stood alone beneath their lighthouse.
He stared at the spot on the cliffs where she’d fallen.
There was no trace of her, not even one of those little roadside crosses. His mother was still trying to get them to put in a guardrail.
Orpheus, called the ocean as it crashed against the rocks.
Eurydice, sang the gulls.
Orpheus, cried the foghorns of the passing ships.
“Eurydice,” he wailed, though his voice was swallowed by the crash of the ocean.
She was down there.
He stood at her edge of the cliff awhile, where the rock met the sky met the sea. He saw it crumble out beneath her, saw her twisting and writhing in stop-motion, saw a single shoe bobbing above the water where she landed.
He stepped forward, squinting. There was something beneath the water. Was there something beneath the water?
Her, it was her. She’d stained it. Blood and water and flesh and bone.
He stepped closer and then closer again until he was right up at the edge of it all. His toes overhung the angry cliff’s edge.
Eurydice, he, or maybe the ocean, sang.
He wobbled. The shadow in the water disappeared. He was above her, he was right above her. She was here just here right here she’d been right here—
Then his feet overhung nothing but sky until the sea swallowed them up, too.
He went down past the water, then past the seabed, then down and through a long, deep, damp dark. If he’d been here a year ago, he would have seen her on this path with him. They would have walked beside each other, arm in arm, until there were no arms and there was no beside and they were no longer each other. But he was a year late, or maybe she was much too early, and she was down there waiting for him, and he was on his way to bring her home.
He went down, and down, and down, and down.
Orpheus, called the strange fish-creatures who lived at the bottom of the sea.
Eurydice, he sang.
I’m coming, he sang. Just wait.
Just wait.
<><><>
Husband. -Band. Husband. Band. Band. Music. Musician. Melody. Oh—O. O. Orpheus.
Orpheus.
Orpheus.
Eurydice.
<><><>
He landed with a terrible thud in what he could only think to call a long hall, though it wasn’t really long and it wasn’t really a hall. At the end of the not-long not-hall was an old-fashioned ticket booth, like the kind at the state fair she’d taken him to the first time he met her father, who made it very clear right then and there that he disapproved. (He was arrogant; he was a musician; his hands were delicate; his life, which was now her life, was impractical.) They’d laughed it off, then both gotten sick on funnel cake and the giant swings, and she’d won him an ugly little stuffed snake from the ring toss. When he’d told her they were unwinnable, she’d just shrugged and tossed the thing at his nose.
A shadow in the ticket booth stared at him. It didn’t speak, but it was saying, You don’t belong here.
“I’ve come to get my wife back.”
You’re still much too alive. You’ll be back to see her soon enough.
“No.”
You’re a coward, Orpheus. You’ve come all this way, and you still wouldn’t die for her.
And he felt it. Flushing his cheeks, warm in the tips of his fingers. He hadn’t died; he should have died. He’d followed her down that same long, dark path, crushed under the waves past the center of the earth, and he hadn’t died. Maybe he was lucky. Maybe their love was fated, cosmic, too strong to be broken by something as mundane as death. Maybe the shadows down here had known.
He saw himself unbuttoning his chest and leaving his heart on the counter. He saw a cold gray coffin in a winter-dead graveyard. He saw their hands clutching each other’s through stone and dirt.
“I’m taking her home.”
That’s not how this works.
He saw himself putting his heart back in its hole and buttoning it up. There was dust on it now, itching against his skin.
The shadow stared at him, so he began to play music.
He hadn’t brought his guitar with him, but that didn’t matter. The darkness itself sang as he plucked at it, strummed at it, sang to it. It was a sound so alien to the space that it didn’t know how to react. It just let him play.
He sang her. He sang her name. He sang the chords and the letters and the slope of her throat and the shape of her fingers. He sang the hollow of the small of her back and the snapdragons she wore in her hair.
It was music so beautiful, so pitiful, even the dead stopped to listen.
Somewhere, deep beyond the gate, a smudgy echo of a woman heard the melody that had once been her name.
In the ticket booth, the shadow might have sighed.
Go home, Orpheus. Turn around and leave and don’t look back, not even if you think you hear something behind you. You might find her waiting for you in the sunlight at the surface, but not a moment sooner. That is all we can do.
He exhaled, he nodded, he turned around, and he climbed.
<><><>
The memory that had once been Eurydice followed that strange, horrible, wonderful sound.
Orpheus, she thought, and it was all she could think. When you were as dead as she was, it was very hard to think anything at all. I am Orpheus.
No, that wasn’t right.
You are Orpheus.
Who was Orpheus?
She kept following the sound, pulled along as if by a string tied to her midsection. If she stopped following, it tugged at her, and her guts threatened to spill out. She followed the sound, his sound, through the darkness, past the cart that had brought her here, past the ticket booth and the long entrance hall, to a tall, narrow flight of stairs.
As she followed, her feet began to make sounds against the surface—first faint, then not. She grew more solid with each step. Her fingers turned from smoke to something near flesh and then to flesh. Her face began to take the shape of a face.
Orpheus, she thought. You are Orpheus. You are my husband.
What was a husband?
Who was she?
Another step, another tug, and the unfamiliar rise and fall of her chest as her lungs remembered what it was to be lungs.
Eurydice, she thought. I am Eurydice. I am your wife.
Was that all she was?
She was sure she must have been more once. She had hands and feet and an arch in the small of her back that was meant for something.
Her heart stuttered into beating again, and she discovered the idea of warmth for the first time.
Your wife.
Orpheus.
Eurydice.
Now that she had a mouth with a tongue and teeth and a voice box, she tried it out loud.
“Eury—”
The tugging stopped. She kept walking, and she felt the slack building on the rope that had been leading her out of the dark. Up the stairs, and up and up, and down the hall, and there was the back of a young man’s head. He wasn’t very tall, and his shoulders weren’t very broad, and he wasn’t all that impressive, actually. His shirt was rumpled and his pants too loose and he stood coiled and shaking like a deer, ready to bolt. He didn’t turn around.
“Are you there?” he said. He wasn’t loud, but the sound of his voice hurt her head. She felt like it might split.
She said nothing.
“Eurydice.” So, that was what her name sounded like aloud. It was pretty. She liked it very much.
She stepped closer. He stepped further away.
“I said, are you there, my love? Answer me.”
They both kept walking.
It was a funny thing, un-dying. It was a little like coming back to your childhood home after years away. Everything was the way you left it, even the old posters taped to your bedroom walls, but you no longer felt connected. Your muscle memory remembered where the spare sheets were, but you couldn’t remember how to find the serving spoons.
It was a very long walk, maybe the longest walk she had ever taken, but she had become unused to the passage of time. It could, in fact, have been a very short walk indeed. It could have ended them right when they began it; it could have finished before it started. She had no way of knowing, but she did know that her muscles—she had muscles!—were beginning to ache from the endless climb, and that she’d be sore in the morning. That was—if there was a morning. Maybe it was already morning. Maybe they’d been doing this forever. She didn’t know if she was more afraid of the staircase never ending or of reaching the top.
He called her name as they walked, over and over, and her footsteps echoed in time with his, but she didn’t know what to say, if she could say anything at all.
So, this was what a man who sang at the gates of Hell looked like. This new-old-new body of hers couldn’t remember his face. It must have been beautiful, if she’d married him. She hoped it was kind. She wondered if he was as pitiful as his music, and what his home looked like, and what he liked to eat for dinner. She wondered if he remembered her or if he only remembered her name.
Eventually, he stopped calling for her.
Eventually, she stopped wondering.
Eventually, she could see light at the top of the stairs and hear the sound of waves crashing against a rocky cliff. She knew this place, she realized, and it was the first thing she knew for certain. They were in a cave on the coast below the lighthouse. Of course, they were. All things led back to this beach.
Ahead of her, Orpheus stopped, and so did she. The sun was casting light on one of his shoulders; the other was still bathed in shadow.
This was it. This was the end.
This was where they started. This was where they ended.
All things led back to this beach.
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She took another step forward, and the sunlight pressed warm against her skin. He began to turn around.
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“Don’t,” she said.
Claire Schultz
Claire Schultz holds a BA in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Chicago and an MPhil Education (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature) from the University of Cambridge. Her fiction has been published in Electric Spec, Pigeon Review, and Crow & Cross Keys, among others. You can find her at clairerschultz.com, or making a fool of herself on Twitter @anotherclaire.