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"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral."
- Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
•-•-•-•-•
There are very few left in Magnus that have a living memory of the dying years, or the age of founders before that. A living memory of an event is more important than any one person can ever realize. With the death of those who were there, who lived through it, comes the death of truth.
Emil was not from Magnus, he had grown up just outside of Cairo. Both of his parents were ex-pats, his mother a Sardinian artist, his father a lapsed seventh son of a wealthy German hotelier. He came third to the Institute, in May of 1962, a month and a half before he was to turn 12. He took his leave nearly 4 years later.
The first time he had heard of Magnus’s dying years was early one morning, not long after he had arrived at the institute. He was sitting in a corner of the Good Doctor's office as the man took his morning coffee. He had said that the dying years were a period of great unrest in the city, and that the Everett's had the singular good fortune of coming out of it nearly unscathed.
Emil Goodhope was born in Cairo in 1950, and yet, he has a living memory of those dying years.
•-•-•-•-•
At the turn of the century, a plague came to Magnus.
247,000 people died over a span of 7 years. A side effect of this where the body barges. Refashioned oceanliners and ferries which transported the bodies of the dead from the Sick Ward on Tarrow Island to the Grand Nanokvoy Cemetery. Half of them sank in waters off the cape of Saint Laurent.
With the advent of the plague, the problem began. Whole families were wiped out. Cemeteries filled at an unprecedented rate. An uncountable number of children were orphaned, ending up on the street. Magnus in its entirety had only 3 million residents at that time. 7 percent of Magnus's population died in those 8 years. The projected numbers by scientific minds of the time said 2 percent would die. 2 percent is immense. 7 percent is disastrous. The unrest built and built, as the city’s wealthiest citizens locked themselves away in their brownstones and manors and Oldtown mansions. Ignoring the death right outside their doors.
The problem led to the riots, and riots led to the end of Magnus’s Founding Families. Then came Dr. Helene Everett, who created an innoculation against the illness that killed so many in Magnus, and thus brought fame and fortune to the Everett family again. With the blight of early November, peace came again, to Magnus, and with it went the dying years.
•-•-•-•-•
January 27th, 1966
Goodhope decides that it was a bad descision exactly 13 seconds after he jumps.
He knew that it was dangerous to come here, to come to his own funeral. But some ill-buried part of him needed to know, needed to see it with his own eyes.
He had been to funerals before, of course, there had been that friend of his Mother's who had passed away - a heart attack if he remembers correctly - when he was about 7, and there was the Stylianou's little girl not long before he had been taken to Candlewood. His Father’s funeral had come so soon after his own birth that he has no living memory of it, although he knows he was there. Photographs, unlike human memory, never lie. They are incapable of such an act. Neutral parties in the passage of finite, human, time.
Goodhope knew that, if anything, funerals were for shining a light on whatever spark of good the decedent possessed. He didn't quite know what to expect of his own, however. He didn't know what impression - if any - he had left behind.
All the Projects were in attendance, the so-called First Class and the ill-named Revels - so many of them still children. The Everett's stood tall and upright amongst the gathered mourners, obelisks rising up out of the sand. What he hadn't expected, however, no matter how many times he had pictured this very moment, was his Mother's presence.
To see her standing on Manor grounds - Renata Goodhope, now un-resposed - so incredibly far removed from his last true memory of her, standing haloed in the sunlit living room of their Cairo apartment, was pure and unfiltered dissonance. His mind was unable to make sense of anything finer than her silhouette, dressed all in black velvet, eyes silver and downcast in grief - in shame, in guilt. She wept openly on her own shoulder.
He wanted nothing more than to run toward her, to grab her by her arms and say - and insist - that she wasn’t alone, that he was fine. That there was nothing to bury because he wasn’t dead, he didn’t burn, he just got lost for a little while, which boys and men alike are want to do. That the paltry tin of ashes she’d been given was nothing more than the remains of charred wallpaper and burnt paneling. That all he wanted was to see another Cairo sunset. But she was mourning a little boy, a child, not the man that he’d become.
Dr. Everett's booming voice rang out among the ancient limestone tombs of the ill-kept graveyard no more than a moment after the empty casket was lowered into the ground:
“Our own Icarus, your arrogance has led you to your undoing.”
A gravestone sits before his yawning grave.
Emil Lee Goodhope
June 30 1950 - January 17 1966
May He Rest in the Arms of Eternity
“Eternity is relative.” He thought bitterly.
There was a poem he knew Dr. Everett had a particular fondness for. He didn't know the origin of the man's love for it, but he had grown up with the good sense to learn.
The Good Doctor, like a pleacher before his congregation, begins thusly;
"Thank Heaven! the crisis,
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last—
And the fever called "Living"
Is conquered at last."
Goodhope murmurs the slant rhymes alongside the man, watching as each Project steps forward to drop soil into his grave. Each face somber and pallid. That is the danger of a funeral, for it too, is a reminder of the fleeting nature of life. It’s finite trappings.
Nothing would ever be finite for him again.
“And I lie so composedly,
Now, in my bed,
(Knowing her love)
That you fancy me dead—
And I rest so contentedly,
Now in my bed
(With her love at my breast).
That you fancy me dead—
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead:—“
“But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie—
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie—
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.”
All men must start running at some point. Death - as was pain, as was loss - is a motivator.
As the last shovelful of soil is laid upon his casket, as interns flock forth to finish the dirty work, Goodhope makes a very important choice, one that he can never take back.
Goodhope decides to run.