“It’s not your fault,” Alice explained to him. “You try, I can see that you try, but you just . . . you’re just wrong about everything. Not very wrong. Not oblivious or negligent or unconcerned. Just a little bit mistaken.”

  “About what? Tell me and I’ll get better.”

  “About what people want, who they are, what they need.”

  “What do you need?” Cyril asked.

  “I need you to stop asking what I need,” she said. “I need you to know. The children need you to know. You never know.”

  “Because you won’t tell me.”

  “See?” she said. “You have to make it my fault. Why should people always have to tell you, Cyril? It’s like you go through life in a well-meaning fog. You can’t help it. Nobody blames you.”

  But she blamed him. He knew that. He tried to get better, to notice more. To remember. But there was that note of impatience—in her voice, the children’s voices, his boss’s voice. As if they were thinking, I’m having to explain this to you?

  Then Alice was hit by a car driven by a resurrected Han Dynasty Chinese man who had no business behind the wheel—he plowed into a crowd on a bustling sidewalk and then got out and walked away as nonchalantly as if he had successfully parallel parked a large car in a small space. It was the most annoying thing about the dead—how they thought killing total strangers was no big deal, as long as they didn’t mean to do it. And since the crowd had only two living people in it, the number of deaths was actually quite low. Alice’s death barely rose to the level of a statistic, in the greater scheme of things.

  She was thoughtful enough to clean up and change clothes before she came home that night—resurrection restored every body part to where it should be at the peak of mature health, but it did nothing for the wardrobe. Still, the change in her attitude was immediate. She didn’t even try to start dinner.

  “What’s for dinner, Mom?” asked Delia.

  “Whatever your father fixes,” said Alice.

  “Am I fixing dinner?” asked Cyril. He liked to cook, but it usually took some planning and he wasn’t sure what Alice would let him use to put together a meal.

  “Go out to eat, have cold cereal, I really don’t care,” said Alice.

  This was not like her. Alice controlled everybody’s diet scrupulously, which was why she almost never allowed Cyril to cook. He realized at once what it meant, and the kids weren’t far behind.

  “Oh, Mom,” said Roland softly. “You’re not dead, are you?”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “But don’t worry, it only hurt for about a minute while I bled out.”

  “Did the resurrection feel good?” asked Delia, always curious.

  “The angel was right there, breathed in my mouth—very sweet. A bit of a tingle everywhere. But really not such a great feeling that it’s worth dying for, so you shouldn’t be in a hurry to join me, dear.”

  “So you won’t be eating with us,” said Cyril.

  She shook her head a little, eyes closed. “ ‘Dead’ means I don’t eat, Cyril. Everyone knows that the dead don’t eat. We don’t breathe except so we can talk. We don’t drink, and if we do, it’s just to keep company with the living, and the liquids all evaporate from our skins so we also don’t pee. We also don’t want sex anymore, Cyril. Not with each other and not with you.”

  She had never mentioned sex in front of the children before, except for the talk with Delia when she turned ten, and that was all about time-of-the-month things. If Delia had any idea what sex was, Cyril didn’t think she got it from her mother. So the children blanched and recoiled when she mentioned it.

  “Oh, don’t be such big babies, you know your father and I had sex or you wouldn’t look so much like him. Which is fine for you, Roland, your father’s a good-looking man, in his way. But a bit of a drag for you, Delia, with that jaw. And the resurrection won’t fix that. Resurrection isn’t cosmetic surgery. Which is really unfair, when you think about it. People who are genetically retarded or crippled or sick have their DNA repaired to some optimum state, but girls with overly mannish features or tiny breasts, or huge ones, for that matter, their DNA is left completely alone, they’re stuck like that for eternity.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Delia. “I love having my confidence destroyed once again, and I haven’t even begun doing my homework yet.”

  “So you aren’t going to eat with us?” asked Roland.

  “Oh, of course I’ll sit at the table with you,” said Alice. “For the company.”

  In the event, Cyril got out everything in the fridge that looked like it might go on a sandwich and everybody made their own. Except Alice, of course. She just sat at the table and made comments, without even a pause to take a bite or chew.

  “The way I see it,” said Alice, “is that it’s all poop. Nothing you’re putting on sandwiches even looks appetizing anymore, because I see that poopiness of it all. You’re going to eat it and digest it and poop it out. The nutrients will decay and eventually end up in some farmer’s field where it will become more future poop, which he’ll harvest and it’ll get processed into a more poopable state, so you can heat it or freeze it or thaw it or whatever, chew it up or drink it, and then turn it into poop again. Life is poop.”

  “Mom,” said Delia. “It’s usually Roland who makes us sick while we’re eating.”

  “I thought you’d want to hear my new perspective as a postliving person.” She sounded miffed.

  “Please speak more respectfully to your mother,” said Cyril to Delia.

  “Cyril, really,” said Alice. “I don’t need you to protect me from Delia’s snippy comments. It’s not going to kill me to hear her judgmentalness directed at the woman who gave birth to her.”

  “Feel free to criticize your mother’s defecatory comments,” said Cyril. “Or ignore them, as you choose.”

  “I know, Dad,” said Delia. There was that familiar hint of eye rolling in her tone of voice. Once again, Cyril must have guessed wrong about what to say, or to leave unsaid. He had never really gotten it right when Alice was alive, and now that she was dead and resurrected, he’d have no chance, because he was no longer dealing with a wife, or even, strictly speaking, a woman. She was a visitor with a key to the house.

  Within a few weeks, Cyril had found himself remembering the awful night of Alice’s death as a particularly lovely time, because she actually sat with them during dinner and wasn’t trying to lead the children off into some kind of utterly bizarre activity.

  She showed up at any hour of the day and expected to be able to take Delia or Roland with her on whatever adventure she’d gotten into her head to try with them.

  “No, Alice, you may not take Roland out of school so he can go scuba diving with you.”

  “It’s really not your place to say what I can or cannot do,” said Alice.

  “The law is clear, Alice—when you die you become, in a word, deceased. You no longer have any custody over the children. Thousands of years of legal precedent make that clear. Not to mention tons of recent case law in which the resurrected are found to be unfit parents in every case.”

  “Aren’t you lucky that the dead can’t get angry,” said Alice.

  “I suppose that I am,” said Cyril. “But I’m not dead, and I was furious when I found you practically forcing Roland to walk along the top of a very high fence.”

  “It’s exhilarating,” said Alice.

  “He was terrified.”

  “Oh, Cyril, are you really going to let a child’s fears—”

  “He was right to be terrified. He could have broken his neck.”

  “And would it have been such a tragedy if he did?” asked Alice. “I was run over by a car and I turned out okay.”

  “You think you’re okay?” asked Cyril.

  Alice held up her hands and twisted her wrists as if to prove that her parts worked.

  “Here’s how I know you’re not okay, Alice,” said Cyril. “You keep trying to put the kids in high-risk situations. You’re trying to kill them, Alice.”

  “Don’t think of it as death. I’m not dead. How is it death?”

  “How can I put this kindly?” said Cyril—who by this point had actually stopped trying to be kind. “You’re dead to me.”

  “Just because I’m no longer available for empty reproductive gestures does not mean I’m not here for you, Cyril.”

  “I’m going to get a restraining order if you don’t stop taking the kids on dangerous activities. You don’t have any guardianship rights over these children.”

  “My fingerprints say I’m still their mother!”

  “Alice, when you were their mother, you wanted them to relish every stage of their life. Now you’re trying to get them to skip all the rest of the stages.”

  “You can’t manipulate me with guilt,” said Alice. “I’m beyond human emotions and needs.”

  “Then why do you still need the children with you?”

  “I’m their mother.”

  “You were their mother,” said Cyril.

  “I was and I am,” said Alice.

  “Alice, I may have been a disappointment as a husband.”

  “And as a father, Cyril. The children are often disappointed in you.”

  “But I meet a basic minimum, Alice. I’m alive. I’m human. Of their species. I want them to be alive. I’d like them to live to adulthood, to marry, to have children.”

  Alice shook her head incredulously. “Go outside and look at the street, Cyril. Hundreds of people lie down and sleep in the streets or on the lawns every night, because the world has no shortage of people.”

  “Just because you’ve lost all your biological imperatives doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t have them.”

  “Cyril, your reasoning is backward. The children will be much happier without biological imperatives.”

  “So you admit you’re trying to kill them.”

  “I’m trying to awaken them from the slumber of mortality.”

  “I don’t want to awaken them from that slumber,” said Cyril sharply. “If it’s a dream, then let them finish the dream and come out of it in their own time.”

  “When someone you love is living in a nightmare,” said Alice, “you wake them up.”

  “Alice,” said Cyril, “you’re the nightmare.”

  “Your wife is a nightmare? Your children’s mother?”

  “You’re a reanimated dead woman.”

  “Resurrected,” said Alice. “An angel breathed into my mouth.”

  “The angel should have minded its damn business,” said Cyril.

  “You always wanted me dead,” said Alice.

  “I never wanted you dead until after you were dead and you wouldn’t go away.”

  “You’re a bitter failure, Cyril, and yet you cling to this miserable life and insist that the children cling to it, too. It’s a form of child abuse. Of child exploitation.”

  “Go away, Alice. Go enjoy your death somewhere else.”

  “My eternal life, you mean.”

  “Whatever.”

  But in the end, Alice won. First she talked Delia into jumping from a bridge without actually attaching any bungee cords to her feet. Once again Cyril had no chance to grieve, because Alice brought Delia by to tell Roland how great death and resurrection were. Delia was fully grown. A woman, but in a retailored version of her dress that fit her larger, womanly body.

  “The soul is never a child,” said Alice. “What did you expect?”

  “I expected her to take a few more years to grow into this body,” said Cyril.

  “Think of it as skipping ahead a few grades,” said Alice, barely able to conceal her gloating.

  If Cyril had thought resurrected Alice was awful, resurrected Delia was unbearable. His love for his daughter had become, without his realizing it, far stronger and deeper than his lingering affection for his wife. So he could not help but grieve for the young girl cut off in her prime. While the snippy, smart-mouthed woman of the same name, who thought she had a right to dwell in his house and follow him around, mocking him constantly—she was a stranger.

  How can you grieve for people who just won’t go away? How can you grieve for a daughter whose grown-up dead-and-resurrected self ridicules your mourning? “Oh, did Daddy lose his widdow baby?”

  There was nothing to do but say an occasional silent prayer—which they mocked when they noticed him doing it. Only Cyril was never quite sure what he was praying for. Please get rid of all the dead? Please unresurrect them? Would God even hear that prayer?

  Roland died of a sudden attack of influenza a few months later. “You can’t blame me for it, this time,” said Alice.

  “You know you were sneaking him out into the cold weather specifically so he’d catch cold. The dying was a predictable result. You’re a murderer, Alice. You should be in hell.”

  Alice smiled even more benignly. “I forgive you for that.”

  “I’ll never forgive you for taking away my children.”

  “Now you’re unencumbered. I thought that’s what you secretly wished for.”

  “Thanks for telling me my deepest wishes,” said Cyril. “They were so deep I never knew they existed.”

  “Come with us, Father,” said Roland.

  “In due time, I’ll go where I can find what I need,” said Cyril. “You don’t need me.

  Roland was so tall. Cyril’s heart ached to see him. My little boy, he thought. But he could not say it. Roland’s gentle pity on him was harder to bear than Delia’s open scorn.

  They would not go. They talked about it, but sheer inertia kept anyone from changing. Finally it dawned on Cyril. Just because he was the only predead resident of the house did not bind him to it. His life had been stripped away from him; why was he clinging to the house that used to hold it?

  For the shower, the toilet, the bathroom sink; for the refrigerator, the microwave, the kitchen table; for the roof, the bed, place to store his clothes. The burden and blessing of modern life. Unlike the resurrected, if Cyril was going to eat, he had to work; if he was going to work, he had to look presentable. For his health he needed shelter from weather, a safe place to sleep.

  The resurrected people that used to love him did not need this place, but would not leave; he needed the place, but could not bear these people who made it impossible for him to truly grieve the terrible losses he had suffered.

  Job had it all wrong, thought Cyril. Having lost his wife and children, it was better to lose all his other possessions and live in an ashpit, covered in boils. Then, at least, everyone could see and understand what had happened to him. His friends might have been wretched comforters, but at least they understood that he was in need of comfort.

  Just because he had to store his food and clothing there, and return there to wash himself and sleep, did not mean he had to live there, to pass waking hours there, listening to his dead wife explain his inadequacies to him, or his dead daughter agree with her, or his dead son pity him.

  Cyril took to leaving work as soon as he could, and sometimes when he couldn’t, just walking out of the building, knowing he was putting his already somewhat pitiful career in jeopardy. He would walk the streets, delaying the commute home as long as possible. He thought of joining his wife and children in death and resurrection, but he had seen how death stripped them of all desire, and even though his current malaise came from the frustration of his deepest desires, he did not want to part with them. Desire was what defined him, he understood that, and to give them up was to lose himself, as his wife and children were lost.

  Bitterly, Cyril remembered the Bible school of his childhood. Lose your soul to find it? Yes, the dead had certainly done that. Lost soul, self, and all, but whatever they had found, it wasn’t really life. Life was about hunger and need and finding ways to satisfy them. Nature red in tooth and claw, yes, but hadn’t the human race found ways to create islands of peace in the midst of nature? Lives in which terror was so rare that people paid money to go to amusement parks and horror movies in order to remember what terror felt like.

  This life was even more peaceful, even less lonely, wasn’t it? When he walked the streets, he was jostled by thousands and thousands of the resurrected, who crowded every street as they went about their meaningless existence, not even curious, but moving for the sake of moving, or so it seemed to him; pursuing various amusements because they remembered that this was a thing that human beings did, and not because they desired amusement.

  They crowded the streets so that traffic barely moved, yet they provided no boost to the economy. Needing nothing, they bought nothing. They had no money, because they had no desires and therefore nothing to work for. They were the sclerosis of commerce. Get out of my way, thought Cyril, over and over. And then: Do what you want. I’m not going anywhere, either.

  He was living like the dead, he recognized that. His life was as empty as theirs. But underneath his despair and loneliness and ennui, he was seething with resentment. Since God obviously existed after all, since it was hard to imagine how else one might explain the sudden resurrection of all who had ever lived, what did he mean by it? What were they supposed to do with this gift that preserved life eternally while robbing it of any sort of joy or pleasure?

  So, Cyril was ironically receptive when he found the uptown mansion with a sign on the door that said:

  GOD’S ANTEROOM

  Nobody used the word “anteroom” anymore, but the idea rather appealed to him. So he went up the short walk and climbed the stoop and opened the front door and stepped inside.

  It was a good-size foyer, which he assumed had been formed by tearing out a wall and combining the front parlor with the original vestibule. The space was completely filled by a small merry-go-round. As far as Cyril could see, no doors or stairs led out of the room except the front door, which he had just come through.

  “Hello?” His voice didn’t echo—the room wasn’t big enough for that. It just fell into the space, flat and dull. He thought of calling again, louder, but instead stepped up onto the carousel.