Текст книги "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"

Автор книги: Anthony Marra

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“How was your day?” he asked, after Ula swallowed her first bite.

“It was so busy,” she murmured.

“Yours too?”

“I spoke to your father.”

His father, a botanist and collector of pressed flowers, had passed ten years earlier. She had never met him. “He must have come a long way to see you.”

“He did. He looked terrible.”

“And what did you talk about?”

“Your mother,” she said, as if it were nothing. He set the bowl on the floor and lay beside her with his arms folded so their noses and kneecaps nearly touched. Her forehead felt as though she’d spent the day in the sun. Maybe it was summer in the exile his father had returned from, and maybe he’d brought a bit for Ula. She didn’t turn to the window when she inhaled; he kissed her nose for it.

“What did he have to say about my mother?”

She closed her eyes for so long he assumed she’d fallen asleep. “I saw a birthmark,” she finally whispered. “An oval on her stomach.”

Soon she slept. He finished the bowl of rice, disappointed by how little she had eaten, and rinsed it in the pail that had become the kitchen sink. After he stitched shut his pockets – to prevent checkpoint soldiers from planting contraband on him the next day – he brushed his teeth with baking soda and climbed into bed. He wiggled his toes. They felt wonderful there, at the ends of his feet. A question surfaced as he swam to meet Ula in sleep. By morning it would be forgotten, drawn back into dreams, but for a moment it sat there left by the tide. The oval-shaped birthmark on his mother’s stomach. He had never told Ula, yet she knew.

CHAPTER 9

This is about your father. I remember he wrote tracts of pure classification, every idea an – ism, every person an – ist, and when I once criticized him for this reductive habit, he said, “We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.” I remember he wanted to teach you to read and write but didn’t know whether to teach you the Cyrillic alphabet (which would be used if the Russians won) or the Latin alphabet (which would be used if the rebels won), and so he taught you the Arabic alphabet instead, and said he would have taught you to read and speak in Japanese if he knew it. I can’t write Arabic. I hope you can read this. I hope there are still people speaking Chechen when you read this. These are stray memories, plucked from the air. But if I closed my eyes and forced myself to find your father, to truly find him, I would find him at his chessboard. In his forty years he lost only three matches. One was to you on your sixth birthday.

I would find him peeling a plum. You haven’t forgotten, have you, how he peeled the skin with a paring knife? A dozen revolutions and the skin came off in a thin, unbroken coil, a meter-long helix. He transformed the skin of that squat little fruit, smaller than your fist, into a measureable length. Then he held the blade to the naked flesh and rotated the plum vertically. One half fell from the other, the cut so clean not even a filament clung to the seed. Pale pink beads dripped to the plate. If Sharik was with me, the dog would contemplate his hands eagerly. But when your father finally let them fall within reach of Sharik’s tongue, he tasted the disappointment of dry skin. Your father wasn’t a graceful man, but he could cut a plum like a jeweler.

He pretended to prefer the skin, and always gave you the flesh. You devoured the slices because you had to wash your hands before touching the chess pieces. It was a beautiful set, hand-carved, purchased by your great-grandfather, before the Revolution, when a postal clerk could afford such intimate craftsmanship. He taught you to play chess, and on your sixth birthday, he let you win. Your father did many things in his forty years. Yet if pressed to recall his finest moment, I would choose to see him in the living room, with you, by the chess set, peeling a plum.

THE THIRD DAY

CHAPTER 10

THEY APPEARED FOUR years before her father was taken, one or two at first, eyes glazed as if they’d never before seen a house, then more. They came stooped and waxen, downcast and wary, from Grozny, Shali, Urus-Martan, one long exhalation toward the mountains. Some carried the most necessary provisions: boots, woolen socks, more woolen socks, bribe money. Those who had lost everything, even their reason, carried the most ridiculous things: a man who lost his parents and children in the same Uragan rocket blast carried the key to the flat they perished in; a thrice-widowed woman carried the framed portrait of a face no one had seen alive for over a hundred years, and no images of her husbands; a retired bureaucrat carried a twelve-hundred-page regulatory binder, convinced that these rules were forever inviolable. Others carried nothing at all. They kept coming and their clothes kept getting bigger on them. Havaa had just learned the Arabic alphabet, and she found the letter shapes in their figures. An eye raised to the mountains was forehead sweat formed a stammer of each jawline was as sharp as the smoke dotting an old man’s bark-loaded pipe was the point above and strung together they were an unpunctuated sentence the road wrote.

Her father seated the first one or two at the kitchen table and put enough food in front of them that they nearly refused to leave. Word spread through the refugee lines, and soon the number exceeded her parents’ modest means. One day she came home from the forest to find her bedroom furniture scattered across the yard, her father and Akhmed modeling new beds on hers, the air pungent with sawdust, the sun glimmering off their bare backs. Two days later her bedroom was converted into a three-bunk hostel. The refugees – that’s what they were, she could say the name in Chechen and write it in Arabic – paid for the night’s sleep, two meals, and laundry line however they could. The shame that tightened Dokka’s ventricles each time he asked for payment soon weakened to a slight, ignorable twitch. The first and thousandth refugees came from different peoples: the former deserving of his compassion and hospitality, the latter of nothing. Let them sleep outside for as long as their grandmother’s jewelry will warm them. Let them eat their rubles. But since so few had jewelry or rubles, and since Dokka was incapable of turning away those truly in need, his parameters for payment expanded to include nearly anything. The tokens and trinkets went to Havaa, who collected them as souvenirs, and so rather than toys or homework she played with and learned from the plastic figurine of a ballerina in pirouette, the field guide to Caucasian flora, and whatever else her father and guest agreed was worth a rickety bunk bed on a winter’s night. Now she slept on a mattress on the floor of her parents’ room. Many nights she woke to find herself in their bed, her body heat held between theirs, distinguishing each in the darkness by the size of their fingers.

Others came on the weekends, strangers better dressed and rested, to see Akhmed. If they had heard rumors of the pedophile’s ghost, they left their children outside when they entered the abandoned house, arms heavy with donations of linen bandages, fishing-line sutures, dry plaster, and slings of old magazines and bandannas. In the waiting room they sat straight-backed and motionless, afraid of breathing too hard, of squeaking the sensitive folding chairs and thus breaking the solemnity the proceedings demanded. Akhmed called them, one family at a time, as if they were his patients. And he wished they were, because they treated him with greater respect than his real patients, and he could do more for them. The family, as it entered Akhmed’s office, likely knew he was the worst doctor in Chechnya. Sitting at the folding chairs before his desk, likely they knew he had followed the wrong calling. Likely they knew the worst doctor in Chechnya was its most talented portraitist.

The father might break the silence with a wet cough, and, praying that Akhmed not ask to examine his chest, describe the shape of his son’s nose. Flat and wide, he might say, as if knocked in the face with a frying pan as a child. No, no, no, the mother might deny before Akhmed’s pencil reached the paper. It is a normal nose, a shapely nose, a beautiful nose, and he was never hit with a frying pan, or a soup pot, or even a kettle; a ladle, yes, of course, that is to be expected because a mother’s kitchen is her sanctum and she must maintain order. Then in might jump a cousin, a sister, an aggrieved daughter who too clearly remembered the slap of a ladle on her outstretched palm. The conversation might never recover if Akhmed didn’t raise his finger to quiet them; he had heard these arguments before, had seen grief warp the fabric of memory such that a mother refused to recognize her son when described by the father, and the father, usually compliant to his wife’s requests, truly believed his son’s nose was so crushed he could only breathe through his mouth. He asked them to close their eyes, and hoped their mouths would follow suit. He asked them to concentrate.

Hunched over the steel-legged desk, a cup of lukewarm black tea within reach, Akhmed might think back to childhood, to the sketches of snake skeletons, knee tendons, and blood veins his father mistook for an interest in science. He might think back to medical school, when he skipped a year of pathology to audit art classes. By that point a career change was beyond consideration; he was a bottle, thrown to the sea, into which the villagers had folded their wishes, and though he was willing to give up on himself, he wasn’t willing to let down those who believed he could carry them over the water. Yet he drew still-lifes when he should have drawn diagrams, studied models when he should have studied corpses. When he graduated from medical school in the bottom tenth he didn’t know the disgrace weighing on him like a hundred rubles in five-kopek coins would one day be converted to less cumbersome denominations, when families, like this one, came, knowing he was too incompetent a doctor to save their son’s life, but so skilled and well-trained an artist he might bring their son back.

Each half minute he would slide the paper across the desk and search their faces for the pause of recognition. Yes, those are his ears, just like that. No, my wife is right, his nose isn’t so wide, and she never hit him with a frying pan. Mistakes would disappear beneath the corners of a pink eraser. That’s him, they say. He is ours.

Some portraits found their way to kiosks where they stared out at the passing refugees, searching for their reflection in the line. Others rested in more intimate spaces: set in a glass frame over an empty bed, or folded in a wallet with nothing else in it, or locked in a bureau drawer beside the birth certificate documenting the exact hour, date, and place that life had entered the world. The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn’t change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after that possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down – and plummetedis the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother’s nose and doesn’t need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother’s bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, who would be buried an arm’s length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother’s prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother’s portrait made, he should have had hismade, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother’s nose, he hadn’t been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he’d believed that plummetwas as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arm’s reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents’ house his portrait hangs within arm’s reach of his older brother’s, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

Every other Sunday Akhmed and Ramzan came to play chess with her father. Ramzan arrived first, knocking with his forehead, his arms hugging a stew pot; sometimes he brought self-awarded gratuities from the shipments he transported to and from the mountains, pickled trout or plum jelly, cured lamb, candied nuts. Then came Akhmed, entering without knocking, grabbing Havaa and hoisting her over his shoulder and threatening to marry her to a toad. In the living room Havaa would serve them tea, and rather than a chore it felt like her own modest contribution to the afternoon. In her eyes, the three men formed a family to whom she wasn’t a daughter but a very young sister. This changed when Khassan joined them, once every few months, as the invisible structure built between them failed to support the weight of another man. In his presence the luster of Ramzan’s laugh dulled and resentment built beneath his quiet face. Akhmed and Khassan monopolized the conversation and Ramzan observed, searching for an opening, but when one came he never knew what to say.

While the men ate she and her mother remained in the kitchen. The custom seemed so unfair, and she didn’t understand why her mother, usually as stubborn as a sleepy ox, submitted to it. Her father allowed her to join them when they finished, provided she didn’t bite her nails, and the ottoman provided the perfect perch from which to watch the chess game. It was a beautiful set of lacquered beech bordered with mother-of-pearl. The board had to have been carved from magical wood, since for all the time she spent in the forest she’d never come across so shiny a tree. The little figures, demarcated by color and bound by rules, made warfare a clean and orderly enterprise. The bulbous heads of pawns and imams, rubbed bald by the touch of too many fingers, were her favorite; months later she would wonder why the rebels and Feds, most in their teens and twenties, still had so much hair. Her father was so skilled that Ramzan and Akhmed played in a team against him. The two consulted and conspired before making their next move, and her father would read a book while they decided, so confident in his mastery he didn’t care if Ramzan cheated. Once he told her that a true chess player thinks with his fingers, and she would remember this, thirteen months later, when he lost his. When his turn came he probed the air indecisively; then, as if each digit independently reached the same conclusion, they came together on the wooden scalp of the imam who slayed Boris Yeltsin, like any good jihadist.

Her father only lost to them twice. The first was in 2001, the Sunday after a company of wounded rebels spent one night of an eighteen-month retreat in Eldár. They came from the hospital in Volchansk, a fact that Akhmed might have exploited when he later took in the girl, had he remembered. When they hobbled into the village square, arms in slings, eyes purpled by exhaustion, the assembled villagers thought the rebels had fled the hospital too soon. One was in a wheelchair. How had the Feds failed to catch them? Their green headbands proclaimed Allahu Akhbarin a golden Arabic script. The villagers, Havaa among them, approached the rebels with cautious curiosity. Many, Havaa among them, had never seen a rebel in the flesh. They were a land over the horizon; sons and brothers would go to the rebelsand never be seen again. Several mothers spoke to them directly, asking after their sons, but most, Havaa among them, watched silently. A shudder passed through the entire assembly when the short field commander planted the green flag of national independence in the square. With this act the rebels – so weak a few children with gardening tools could have overpowered them – had officially seized the village, and thus damned it to a Russian liberation.

They demanded medical attention and were taken to Akhmed’s clinic by a dozen villagers who introduced the rebels and disappeared, grateful for the clinic for the first time. Only after checking the linen closet for a potential Federal ambush were they willing to disarm. On the other side of the village, Havaa saw none of it. She sat with her mother, in the safety of the kitchen. Had she seen the short, squat field commander, she might have thought he looked like a half-emptied grain sack in fatigues. He addressed Akhmed courteously, reiterating the importance of communal sacrifice in the campaign to defeat the godless Russian scourge. Akhmed held his hands together but one couldn’t stop the other’s tremble. He warned the field commander that he wasn’t a very good doctor, that a pedophile’s ghost was said to haunt the clinic, and that he would much rather draw his portrait. In a deep, even voice as he unbuttoned his shirt, the field commander informed Akhmed that if he didn’t become the best doctor in Chechnya within the next five minutes, he’d soon haunt the clinic as well. A surgical thread Akhmed had never encountered held the field commander’s chest together.

“What is this?” Akhmed asked.

“Dental floss,” the field commander said. Given the lichenous growth on the field commander’s incisors, Akhmed assumed the floss hadn’t seen much prior action.

“Dental floss stitches. I’ve never seen such fine work. Who put them in?”

“A doctor at the Volchansk hospital. She was both a woman and an ethnic Russian. Can you believe it?”

The self-doubt that had unfolded from the envelope with every hospital rejection letter again stole Akhmed’s breath. “No,” he said, dispirited. In three and a quarter years, when Sonja was to offer him a job, Akhmed would finally find that breath.

On the other side of the village Havaa was studying the pale blue flowers on her mother’s skirt, annoyed she couldn’t find them in the Caucasian flora guide. Why invent flowers when so many real ones would be honored to find their faces on a skirt? Her mother had spent the afternoon in the back garden and now chopped carrots, beets, and thyme lay on the counter. Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. Later that afternoon the door would quietly close and her father would enter. He would speak with that deliberate, deceptive tone he used when reading her a story whose ending he already knew. She would ask if the army men would be staying with them and he would say, no, they’re not refugees, and leave it at that. She wouldn’t know that her father and Ramzan had spent nearly an hour conversing with the field commander. She wouldn’t know that the field commander, impressed by Ramzan’s experience as a trader in the mountains, had put him in touch with a sheikh who was looking for a capable man, a man like Ramzan, to deliver arms to the rebel encampments. All she would know was that the following Sunday, a day before the Feds arrived, her father lost Boris Yeltsin to a rook.

Three mornings after the rebels tottered from the village, Havaa woke to her parents’ hushed panic. Her father hoisted her in his arms before she could change out of her nightclothes. The impact of each footstep jolted through her, and as he ran into the forest, she watched the village shrink over his shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We are being liberated,” her mother panted from beside her.

A rotten log shielded them from all but the zachistka’s sound. When a ten-second spray of gunfire flooded the sky, Havaa couldn’t have imagined it was directed at eight villagers deemed too dangerous to be transported to the Landfill. Lying on the mossy topsoil for hours, she thought of her father’s defeat the previous afternoon. She knew that Russian soldiers could destroy a village, but she hadn’t known her father could lose a chess match. He lay next to her, twitching at the slightest shift in the wind, his fingers white around the handle of the kitchen knife. The rising smoke was so thick dusk came at three o’clock. Her father peered over the log with a pair of binoculars. He passed her the binoculars, the two-night payment of an ornithologist, who was now homesick, studying birds in Ecuador. As she spied Feds through the gaps between tree trunks, her father explained the difference between kontraktnikiand ordinary draft soldiers.

“The draft soldiers in blue uniforms are scared teenagers. They are what we might call the victims of absurdism,” he said, not one to miss an opportunity to lecture a captive audience. “They would surrender if you waved a soup spoon at them. Most can’t find Chechnya on a map and don’t care if Putin, Maskhadov, or Father Christmas presides over the republic; most arrived by train in passenger carriages but most will return as Cargo 200, sealed within zinc-lined coffins in the freights. But the kontraktniki, the ones you see wearing sleeveless black T-shirts to show off their tattoos, they are nihilists, immoralists, or misanthropists, take your pick. They were released from prison provided they serve a certain number of years in Chechnya. They wantto be here because this is the only place they can express their true nature, and, if I weren’t hiding behind a log, I suppose I might even admire them because they are committed to the dialectics of their philosophy, no matter how horrid.”

At that moment, a blond-haired conscript had pulled Khassan from the line of men that were to be taken to the Landfill. He hid Khassan in a tin-roofed shed and gave him his grandparents’ name and address. “You must survive,” the blond-haired conscript said. “You must survive and tell my grandparents. Tell them their grandson is not like the other solidiers. Tell them that they raised him well, that he’s trying so hard to stay the boy they raised.” Khassan would write a letter to the conscript’s grandparents, but without access to a functional postal system, it would remain in his drawer for seventeen months, until the autumn morning when a Russian woman knocked on his door, asking if he had seen her son. It wasn’t uncommon to see the mothers of missing Russian soldiers searching the Chechen highlands for their sons. Khassan wouldn’t be able to help her, but he would ask her to post his letter from Russia. He wouldn’t know that in Novosibirsk the grandparents of the blond-haired conscript would receive his letter eight days after they received word of their grandson’s death and would read it as a eulogy at his funeral.

By evening the village still lay under an awning of smoke. Twenty-three had died. Fourteen from gunfire, three from collapsed houses, two from mortar fire, and one from suicide: a ninety-year-old man who had survived two world wars, three heart attacks, and, most debilitating of all, the shame of his firstborn son, a boy who could have been anything but chose to be a puppeteer. The Feds forced three into a cellar and lobbed in a live grenade before shutting the door. Another eighteen were taken to the Landfill, which meant forty-one villagers disappeared that day, to return only by the grace of Akhmed’s pencil. Shortly after Havaa followed her parents home, Akhmed appeared in the doorframe and knelt to knock on the kicked-in door. He needed Havaa’s fingers. In his clinic the wounded lay on every surface flat enough to hold a body. The butt of a Kalashnikov had forever shut a woman’s left eye. The arm of a man who would go on to summit Elbrus bent as if it had three elbow joints. Akhmed’s hand, flaccid on her shoulder, guided Havaa through the waiting room. His office was an operating theater. Mountainous tarpaulin topography spread across his desk, streams flowing into lakes of blood. A lamp sat on the floor, its light pinning the silhouette of Akhmed’s head to the ceiling where it would blankly observe the scene. He spoke as if accountable to her, explaining that this wasn’t a hospital and he wasn’t a surgeon, that he could draw lovely sketches of the wounded but couldn’t save their lives, that the doctors at Hospital No. 6 were unquestionably superior and had the zachistkacordon not blocked all traffic to the city, he would carry each to the hospital on his back to avoid the responsibility of their care.

Two neighbors helped him carry a limp body to the desk. He cleaned the wound with water, but he had run out of iodine solution and had to use a half bottle of spirtfor sterilization. He made a homemade hemostat by wrapping clean bandages around the head of a pliers and clinching the handles with a rubber band.

Akim was thirteen, the first wisps of a mustache filled in with soot. Red dishrags were wrapped around his thigh, and between half-opened lids, his eyes found Havaa’s.

“My fingers are too big,” Akhmed repeated as he tightened a leather belt around Akim’s thigh. The adults in her life all acted like children, and rather than compounding her fear, this forced her to be calm. Piece by piece she broke down the room, chopping the ceiling from the walls and the walls from the floor, amputating her shadow from her feet, until the one floorboard holding her was all that remained. Akhmed explained that Havaa had to help him ligate an artery with thread from a frayed skirt. A few months earlier her mother had taught her to sew and he knew that for her father’s birthday she had mended the toes of all his socks.

“Okay,” she said, though she didn’t want to help Akhmed, though she wanted to hide in the forest, where birch branches were the only limbs that ever broke. But she did it for Akhmed, rather than for the boy, who once had found her talking to a pinecone and had teased her so badly she had wished him dead.

She couldn’t sleep that night. In the quiet of her parents’ bedroom she could still hear his screams. Everything was different now. She couldn’t say how or when, whether it had happened when her father had carried her to the woods, or when her fingers had sunk into the hot ooze of Akim’s open thigh, but everything was different. On either side her parents lay awake, and when she squeezed the flaps of their pajama tops, as she had always done for reassurance when she had a bad dream, her mother squeezed back.

No one wanted to risk moving the unexploded shells that lay scattered across the village, so the next morning Havaa’s parents, among other villagers, pried toilet bowls from the rubble of collapsed houses and dragging them upside down and two by two gently set them over the unexploded shells. Havaa would never forget the sight. So many dozens of upside-down toilet bowls crowded the street that cars wouldn’t pass for weeks, and in that time, she would occasionally hear the overdue explosions, the shrapnel ringing within the ceramic, but those bowls, the one decent legacy of the Soviet Union, never broke.

In the afternoon, she and her parents went to the clinic. Akhmed wouldn’t meet their eyes when they entered his office. The blood-hardened tarpaulin lay on the floor, and in its red desert Havaa remembered streams. Akhmed slouched forward, his head propped against the desk by his pencil.

“I can’t remember their faces,” he muttered.

“Whose?” her father asked.

“I promised I would draw them, but I can’t remember anymore.”

“You should sleep,” her father said, and beside him, her mother gazed at Akhmed with an expression of concern Havaa would only later recall.

When Akhmed woke, he kept his promise. He mounted blank pages on plywood boards, and over the next ten days drew forty-one meter-tall portraits. He used ink and charcoal, the cinders of burnt houses; there was a word for it, when artists used parts of the subject to recreate the subject, an – ism only Dokka would know. The portraits were larger and more detailed than anything he’d ever drawn. Eyelashes five pen strokes thick. Pupils the size of plum pits. When finished, he brushed the portraits with weatherproof finish and left them to dry overnight. By morning they shone like the lacquer of Dokka’s chessboard. One at a time, he carried them to the street. Some he mounted within the doorless frames of abandoned public buildings; others he fixed into the walls of private homes, or hung over broken windows, or strung from empty planters, or raised to the top of flagpoles, or nailed to lampposts, tree trunks, or fences. One covered the hole punched into a wall by a mortar round. Another he staked upright in the cemetery, a tombstone for a man whose family couldn’t afford one. They appeared with no commemoration louder than Akhmed’s solitary hammer rap. Sometimes weeks or months would pass before the bereaved stumbled across the face of their disappeared, and when they did they might approach in awe, or pat their breast pocket for a cigarette, or laugh as if just understanding a joke, or ignore it entirely, having grown used to hallucinating their loved ones on walls, tombstones, and clouds.