It was small. Only two concentric circles of animals to ride, the outer one with seven, the inner one with three, plus a single one-person bench shaped like the Disney version of a throne, molded in smooth, rounded lines of hard plastic pretending to be upholstery.

  Cyril thought of sitting there, since it required no effort. But he thought better of it, and walked around the carousel, touching each animal in turn. Chinese dragon, zebra, tiger, horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giant mouse. Porpoise, eagle, bear. All extravagantly detailed and finely hand painted—there was nothing sloppy or faded or seedy, about the thing. In fact, he could truly say that the carousel was a work of art, a small, finely crafted version of a mass entertainment.

  He had never known there was such a thing as a boutique carousel. Who would ever come to ride such a thing? And what would they pay? Part of the pleasure of full-size carousels was the fact that they were so crowded and public. Here in this room, the carousel looked beautiful and sad at the same time. Too small for the real purpose of a carousel—a place where people could display themselves to one another, while enjoying the mild pleasure of moving up and down on a faux beast. Yet, too large for the room, crowded, almost as if this were a place where beautiful things were stored while awaiting a chance for display in a much larger space.

  Cyril sat on the hippopotamus.

  “Would you like me to make it go?” asked a woman’s voice.

  Cyril had thought he was alone. He looked around, startled, a little embarrassed, beginning the movement of getting back off the hippo, yet stopping himself because the voice had not challenged him, but rather offered to serve him.

  Then he saw her through the grillwork of the faux ticket booth in a space that must have been a coat closet when the house was first built. How did she get in or out? The booth had no door.

  Her appearance of youth and health led him to assume she was dead and resurrected.

  “I can’t really afford . . .” he began.

  “It’s free,” she said.

  “Hard to stay in business at those rates,” said Cyril.

  “It’s not a business,” she said.

  Then what is it? he wanted to ask. But instead he answered, “Then yes, I’d like to ride.”

  Silently the carousel slipped into movement without a lurch; had he not been paying attention, Cyril would not have been able to say when movement began.

  The silence did not last long, for what would a carousel be without music? No calliope, though—what accompanied this carousel sounded like a quartet of instruments. Cello, oboe, horn, and harpsichord, Cyril thought, without any effort to sort out the sounds. Each instrument was so distinctive that it was impossible not to catalog them. They played sedate music in three-four time, as suited a carousel or skating rink, yet the music was also haunting in a modal, folk-songish way.

  Cyril let the carousel carry him around and around. The movement did not have the rapid sweep of a full-size carousel but rather the dizzying tightness of spin of a children’s hand-pushed merry-go-round. He had to close his eyes now and then to keep from becoming light-headed or getting a slight headache from the room, which kept slipping past his vision.

  It did not occur to him to ask her to slow it down, or stop. He simply clung to the pole and let it move him and the hippo up and down.

  Because the music was so gentle, the machinery so silent, the distance from him to the ticket booth so slight even when he was on the far side of the room, Cyril felt it possible—no, obligatory—to say something after a while. “How long does the ride last?” he asked.

  “As long as you want,” she said.

  “That could be forever,” he said.

  “If you like,” she said.

  He chuckled. “Do you get overtime?”

  “No,” she said. “Just time.”

  “Too bad,” he said. Then he remembered that she was dead, and neither payment nor time would mean very much to her.

  “Do you read?” he asked. “Or do you have a DVD player in there?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “To pass the time. Between patrons. While the customers are riding. It can’t be thrilling to watch me go around and around.”

  “It actually is,” she said. “Just a little.”

  Liar, thought Cyril. Nothing was thrilling to the dead.

  “You’re not dead yet,” she said.

  “No,” he answered, wanting to add, What gave me away? but keeping his silence. He knew what gave him away. He had asked questions. He was curious. He had bothered to ride at all. He had closed his eyes to forestall nausea. So many signs of life.

  “So you can’t ride forever.”

  “I suppose not,” said Cyril. “Eventually I have to sleep.”

  “And eat,” she said. “And urinate.”

  “Doesn’t look like you have a restroom, either,” said Cyril.

  “We do,” she said.

  “Where?” He looked for a door.

  “It has an outside entrance.”

  “Don’t the homeless trash the place?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind cleaning it up,” she said.

  “So you do it all? Run the carousel, clean the restrooms?”

  “That’s all there is,” she said. “It isn’t hard.”

  “It isn’t interesting, either.”

  “Interesting enough,” she said. “I don’t get bored.”

  Of course not. You have to have something else you want to be doing before you really feel bored.

  “Where are you from?” asked Cyril, because talking was better than not talking. He wanted to ask her to stop the carousel, because he really was getting just a little sick now, but if he stopped, she might insist that he go. And if he got off, yet was allowed to stay, where would he stand while he talked to her?

  “I died here as a little girl. My mother gave birth to me on the voyage.”

  “Immigrants,” said Cyril.

  “Isn’t everyone?” she answered.

  “So you never grew up.”

  “I’m up,” she said, “but you’re right, without growing into it. I was very sick, my mother wiping my brow, crying. And then I was full-grown, and had this strange language at my lips, and there were all these buildings and people and nothing to do.”

  “So you found a job.”

  “I came through the door and found the ticket booth standing open. I knew it was called a ticket booth as soon as I saw it, though I never saw a ticket booth before in my life. I could read the signs, too, and the letters, though they weren’t in the language I learned as a baby. I turned on the carousel and it went around and I like to watch it, so I stayed.”

  “So nobody hired you.”

  “Nobody’s told me to go,” she said. “The machinery isn’t complicated. I can make it go backward, too, but nobody likes that, so I don’t even offer anymore.”

  “Can you make it go slower?”

  “That’s the slowest setting,” she said. “It can go at two faster speeds. Do you want to see?”

  “No,” he said quickly, though for a moment he wanted to say yes, just to find out what it would feel like.

  “No one likes that, either, though people still ask. The living ones throw up sometimes, at the faster speeds.”

  “Sometimes the resurrected come to ride?”

  “Sometimes they come with the living ones. A dead mother and her living children. That sort of thing.”

  “How do you like it?” he asked.

  “Well enough,” she said, “or I wouldn’t stay.”

  He realized she must have thought he meant how she liked her job, or watching the carousel.

  “I meant, how do you like resurrection?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a choice, so I don’t think about it.”

  “When you were dying, what did you want?”

  “I wanted my mother not to cry. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to feel better.”

  “Do you feel better now?” asked Cyril.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so. My mother isn’t crying anymore. I found her after I resurrected. She didn’t know me, but I knew her. She was just as I remember her, only not so sad. She and I didn’t talk long. There wasn’t much to say. She said that she wept for me until her husband made her stop so he could bury me. She wouldn’t move away, because she would have to leave my grave behind, so they lived their whole lives nearby, and raised eleven other children and sent them out into the world, but she never forgot me.”

  The story made Cyril want to weep for his own dead children, even though they were alive again, after a fashion. “She must have been glad to see you,” he said.

  “She didn’t know me. It was her baby that she wanted to see.”

  “I know,” said Cyril. “My wife got my children to die and they came back like you. Grown-up. I miss the children that I lost.” And then he did cry, just a couple of sobs, before he got control of himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been able to cry till now. Because they’re still there.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m glad to see you cry.”

  He didn’t even ask why. He knew: her mother, being resurrected, had not cried. The woman needed to see a living person cry for a dead child.

  Needed. How could she need anything?

  “What’s your name?” asked Cyril.

  “Dorcas,” she said.

  “Not a common name anymore,” said Cyril.

  “It’s from the Bible. I never studied the Bible when I was alive. I was too young to read. But I came back knowing how to read. And the whole Bible is in my memory. So is everything. It’s all there, every book. I can either remember them as if I had already read them, or I can close my eyes and read them again, or I can close my eyes and see the whole story play out in front of my eyes. And yet I never do. It’s enough just to know what’s in all the books.”

  “All of them? All the books ever written?”

  “I don’t know if it’s all of them. But I’ve never thought of a book that I haven’t read. If one book mentions another book, I’ve already read it. I know how they all end. I suppose it must be more fun to read if you don’t already know every scene and every word.”

  “No worse than the carousel,” said Cyril. “It just goes around and around.”

  “But the face of the person riding it changes,” she said. “And I don’t always know what they’re going to say before they say it.”

  “So you’re curious.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t really care. It just passes the time.”

  Cyril rode in silence for a while.

  “Why do you think he did it?” he finally asked.

  “Who?” she asked. Then, “Oh, you mean the resurrection. Why did God, you know.”

  “This is God’s Anteroom, right? So it seems appropriate to wonder. Why now. Why everybody all at once. Why children came back as adults.”

  “Everybody gets their perfect body,” she said. “And knowledge. Everything’s fair. God must be fair.”

  Cyril pondered that. He couldn’t even argue with it. Very evenhanded. He couldn’t feel that he had been singled out for some kind of torment. Many people had suffered worse. When his children had died, he was still able to talk to them. It had to feel much worse if they were simply gone.

  “Maybe this is a good thing,” said Cyril.

  “Nobody believes that,” she said.

  “No,” said Cyril. “I can’t imagine that they do. When you wish—when your child dies, or your wife. Or husband, or whatever—you don’t really think of how they’d come back. You want them back just as they were. But then what? Then they’d just die again, later, under other circumstances.”

  “At least they’d have had a life in between,” said Dorcas.

  Cyril smiled. “You’re not the ordinary dead person,” he said. “You have opinions. You have regrets.”

  “What can I regret? What did I ever do wrong?” she asked. “No, I’m just pissed off.”

  Cyril laughed aloud. “You can’t be angry. My wife is dead, and she’s never angry.”

  “So I’m not angry. But I know that it’s wrong. It’s supposed to make us happy and it doesn’t, so it’s wrong, and wrongness feels . . .”

  “Wrong,” Cyril prompted.

  “And that’s as close as I can come to being angry,” said Dorcas. “You too?”

  “Oh, I can feel anger! I don’t have to be ‘close,’ I’ve got the real thing. Pissed off, that’s what I feel. Resentful. Spiteful. Whining. Self-pitying. And I don’t mind admitting it. My wife and children were resurrected and they’ll live forever and they seem perfectly content. But you’re not content.”

  “I’m content,” she said. “What else is there to be? I’m pissed off, but I’m content.”

  “I wish this really were God’s Anteroom,” said Cyril. “I’d be asking the secretary to make me an appointment.”

  “You want to talk to God?”

  “I want to file a complaint,” said Cyril. “It doesn’t have to be, like, an interview with God himself. I’m sure he’s busy.”

  “Not really,” said the voice of a man.

  Cyril looked at the inner row, where a handsome young man sat on the throne. “You’re God?” Cyril asked.

  “You don’t like the resurrection,” said God.

  “You know everything, right?” asked Cyril.

  “Yes,” said God. “Everybody hates this. They prayed for it, they wanted it, but when they got it, they complained, just like you.”

  “I never asked for this.”

  “But you would have,” said God, “as soon as somebody died.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked for this,” said Cyril. “But what do you care?”

  “I’m not resurrected,” said God. “Not like them. I still care about things.”

  “Why didn’t you let them care, then?” asked Cyril.

  “Billions of people on Earth again, healthy and strong, and I should make them care? Think of the wars. Think of the crimes. I didn’t bring them back to turn the world into hell.”

  “What is it, if it isn’t hell?” asked Cyril.

  “Purgatory,” said Dorcas.

  “Limbo,” Cyril suggested back.

  “Neither one exists,” said God. “I tried them for a while, but nobody liked them, either. Listen, it’s not really my fault. Once a soul exists, it can never be erased. Annihilated. I found them, I had to do something with them. I thought this world was a good way to use them. Let them have a life. Do things, feel things.”

  “That worked fine,” said Cyril. “It was going fine till you did this.” He gestured toward Dorcas.

  “But there were so many complaints,” said God. “Everybody hated death, but what else could I do? Do you have any idea how many souls I have that still haven’t been born?”

  “So cycle through them all. Reincarnation, let them go around and around.”

  “It’s a long time between turns,” said God. “Since the supply of souls is infinite.”

  “You didn’t mention infinite,” said Cyril. “I thought you just meant there were a lot of us.”

  “Infinite is kind of a lot,” said God.

  “To me it is,” said Cyril. “I thought that to you—”

  “I know, this whole resurrection didn’t work out like I hoped. Nothing does. I should never have taken responsibility for the souls I found.”

  “Can’t you just . . . put some of us back?”

  “Oh no, I can’t do that,” said God, shaking his head vehemently. “Never that. It’s—once you’ve had a body, once you’ve been part of creation, to take you back out of it—you’d remember all the power, and you’d feel the loss of it—like no suffering. Worst thing in the world. And it never ends.”

  “So you’re saying it’s hell.”

  “Yes,” said God. “There’s no fire, no sulfur and all that. Just endless agony over the loss of . . . of everything. I can’t do that to any of the souls. I like you. All of you. I hate it when you’re unhappy.”

  “We’re unhappy,” said Cyril.

  “No,” said God. “You’re sad, but you’re not really suffering.”

  Cyril was in tears again. “Yes I am.”

  “Suck it up,” said God. “It can be a hell of a lot worse than this.”

  “You’re not really God,” said Cyril.

  “I’m the guy in charge,” said God. “What is that, if not God? But no, there’s no omnipotent transcendental being who lives outside of time. No unmoved mover. That’s just stupid anyway. The things people say about me. I know you can’t help it. I’m doing my best, just like most of you. And I keep trying to make you happy. This is the best I’ve done so far.”

  “It’s not very good,” said Cyril.

  “I know,” said God. “But it’s the best so far.”

  Dorcas spoke up from the ticket booth. “But I never really had a life.”

  God sighed. “I know.”

  “Look,” said Cyril. “Maybe this really is the best. But do you have to have everybody stay here? On Earth, I mean? Can’t you, like, create more worlds?”

  “But people want to see their loved ones,” said God.

  “Right,” said Cyril. “We’ve seen them. Now move them along and let the living go on with our lives.”

  “So maybe a couple of conversations with the dead and they move on,” said God, apparently thinking about it. “What about you, Dorcas?”

  “Whatever,” she said. “I’m dead, what do I care?”

  “You care,” said God. “Not the cares of the body. But you have the caring of a soul. It’s a different kind of desire, but you all have it, and it never goes away.”

  “My wife and children don’t care about anything,” said Cyril.

  “They care about you.”

  “I wish,” said Cyril.

  “Why do you think they haven’t left? They see you’re unhappy.”

  “I’m unhappy because they won’t go,” said Cyril.

  “Why haven’t you told them that? They’d go if you did.”

  Cyril said nothing. He had nothing to say.

  “You don’t want them to go,” said Dorcas.

  “I want my children back,” Cyril said. “I want my wife to love me.”