Kiss Me, I'm Dead Read online

  The fire spread first to the promenade, and then to the hurricane deck. The stairwells were littered with bodies, choked with fire and smoke. Passengers streamed toward the stern, snatching life vests from the ceiling as they moved. But the shoulder straps were mostly rotten. As mothers fought over them, like rabid dogs, the life vests crumbled in their hands. Some lashed them to their children anyway, and tossed them overboard with anxious prayers. Others cowered as the flames drew near. Negro deckhands turned on gray fire hoses but they burst like overstuffed sausages. The crowd yanked them from their hands. Nothing worked. Anyway, it was too late.

  Those who had not been burned alive, or overcome by smoke, had leapt across the rails already, into the choppy waters of the river. Most simply could not swim and drowned after only a few seconds. A precious few grabbed floating debris – one boy a wooden hobbyhorse – and tried to stay afloat until the fleet of vessels gathering in our wake could pick them up.

  I remember standing on the hurricane deck, engulfed now in bright orange flames. I remember feeling the heat lick at my skin. I could not find my mother, or my sisters, or my brother. I saw a woman watch her daughter burst into a fire fountain. She wept. We all wept, but our tears evaporated on our cheeks. The river called me, although I could not swim. I’d never learned. It had seemed, well . . . pointless at the time. I could hear the screams of children blistering. I could smell the stench of burning flesh. I saw a boy climb up onto the after-rail, his golden hair on fire. But he did not leap into the waves. He simply stood there, like a torch. Then he tipped over, broke in half. I saw women not much older than myself burn, blacken and crumble, their babies pressed against their chests.

  I felt the hands of someone pull me from behind. It was Dustin. He was alive! I could see him now, despite the smoke and flames. He was wrestling with a life vest. But it was just too late. Too late, in fact, for nearly all of us.

  The burning decks gave way, collapsed, and those who remained aboard cascaded down into the opening, through the flooring to the very bottom of the ship, the bilge, an inferno of wood, and rope, and oily rags and canvas, and cords of human flesh. Dustin tumbled off the deck. He was gone, sucked down into the darkness by the frothing waves, only to reappear quite suddenly, scooped up by the steamship’s massive paddle wheel, swung round and dropped onto a nearby tugboat. Like providence divine.

  I was already in the water. I felt the surface tension slip across my face as though it were an undergarment, dressing me for death. My skirt began to suck me down. The water was my outer skin. I could feel it crushing me as the ship slipped underneath the waves. I was trapped. I could not move. Dustin was gone. I was alone, save for the other figures waving in the currents, grist for the running tide.

  I let the water in, then. Into my mouth and nose. Into my lungs. I let it take me, like a lover, like Dustin wanted to, and should have done. Before. I let the river fill me up.

  The steamship bumped, and spun about, and slowly drifted from North Brother to Hunts Point. She groaned and slithered with the current, plowing the seafloor with her keel. Time stopped again. I saw the tiny hairs on distant arms go stiff. Some were still clasping babies. Bubbles refused to rise. Corpses stopped bobbing on the surface. I saw the flames grow still. And then I felt myself begin to tear, out of my very skin, like a butterfly, abandoning my cocoon self, this mortal coil. I felt myself ascend, to fly, to burst across the river, no longer needing to breathe, no longer feeling the weight of my own body. Now, to my vigil.

  All this comes back to me, and I remember, like the pattering of raindrops on a window, yet another afternoon – three weeks earlier, it must have been – when Louisa and I had gone to Coney Island. We had wandered through the Hall of Mirrors, seen all the countless versions of ourselves, the possible conclusions.

  I do not understand it all. Not yet, at least. I know I have to do something, but what? I have no idea. I can’t just stay here, in Middle Village, Queens, trapped between this world and the next. Nor can I move on to the great beyond until my friends and family have mourned me, until some justice to the guilty has been meted out. It seems that only then will I let go. After the trial and punishment. Only then will a single lifeline settle within time, like the gradually declining hum of a violin string, plucked once, and then released.

  Can anybody hear me? Is anybody there?

  Chapter 2

  June 15, 1904

  Kleindeutchland, New York City

  The news blew like an ill wind through Kleindeutchland, moved like a plague. With a population of only eighty thousand, all knew someone who had been aboard the Slocum, or knew someone who knew someone. None could escape. No amount of lamb’s blood on the lintel could send the Angel of Death on his way.

  The fear was something you could taste. It was palpable. It fell upon you without looking: sitting at your desk; ambling down the street; in school; at home – no matter where you were. It latched onto your bones like the jaws of a ravenous beast. Borne on a wave of grim tidings, it reached Arvin Brauer as he was brewing yet another batch of the Golden Rose’s most infamous pale ale. Hans Miller was the one who broke the news.

  Twelve and precocious beyond his years, Hans somehow knew all things that had an impact on Kleindeutchland – like a contemporary Hermes, messenger of the gods. He appeared, disheveled, as was his wont, wearing a soot-black cap, pitched down in front, with a perennial scowl below his periwinkle eyes – bright as the headlights of a distant carriage, looming over a hill. “Meister Brauer,” he said. “Meister Brauer,” he kept on saying, until Arvin shook him by the shoulders.

  “What is it, Hans? What’s wrong?”

  “The Slocum,” he muttered, as if waking from a dream.

  “What about her?” Arvin Brauer’s blood grew cold. “What about the Slocum?” he repeated.

  “She is sunk.”

  Arvin Brauer leaned on the boy, as much to prop himself up as to pacify young Miller. “How many?”

  “How many, sir?”

  “How many . . . perished?” Arvin could barely squeeze the words out. His lungs felt as though they had collapsed.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said, adding, “She floundered as she burned. Some jumped, they say. But most were drowned. Some say a thousand, sir. Or more.”

  “A thousand!” The master brewer took a small step backward. “So many?”

  “It may be more by nightfall.” Miller had a disconcerting way of fidgeting as he stood, as if he were going to suddenly run off, without warning, on some new errand of extreme importance.

  “Dustin,” said Arvin. He shook the boy again. “What have you heard about my son? He was on board.”

  “Nothing,” said Miller, backing up. “I’m sorry, sir. But I have others to inform.” He held a tiny hand out. “I have to go.”

  Arvin Brauer slipped a nickel into the messenger’s cold fingers. “Thank you,” he said, and wondered at the words. He took his apron off mechanically. He donned his coat and black felt hat. He started for the door. It was only when he had ventured out into the street that he remembered he had failed to quench the boiling vat. This batch of ale would die only half formed.

  * * *

  I can see the marsh birds flying overhead, the vast wetlands of Schlüsselburg, due south of the mighty Weser River. I can see a far, far younger Arvin Brauer – with the same dark eyes of my love, Dustin – as he moves from one town to the next, tramping from brewing job to brewing job around Westphalia in Lower Saxony. How afraid and yet how strong he was, so much like his own son would become. A Jew amidst so many gentiles. And not just any Jew: a Maskilim; a follower of the Haskalah, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, that sprang up like a fountain in the 1770s and coursed across the Jewish mindscape until the latter nineteenth century. Inspired by the European Enlightenment that would eventually give birth to the American idea, the Haskalah was based upon the “rational.” It encouraged Jews to study more than just the Talmud; to learn their local European languages and not just Hebrew;
to enter fields such as agriculture, and crafts, the arts and sciences – even such worldly tasks as brewing beer. The Maskilim attempted to assimilate into European society through dress, through language, manners, and their loyalty to native ruling powers. But it did Arvin Brauer little good. For bundled together with his thirst for rationality, with his desire to assimilate and to belong came his enlightened burgeoning belief in the rights of all men to be free.

  It was 1888 when Dustin Brauer was born . . . and his mother, Tabea, died. His grandfather – Arvin’s father – had recently passed away and, due to the laws of primogeniture and entail, only the eldest of the Brauer clan – firstborn son, Samuel – could inherit the marshy farmland Arvin’s father had scraped together from a lifetime of labor in the breweries of Prussia. Even if he had wanted to, Samuel couldn’t have shared his small inheritance. The law of entail made it verboten for him to divide up his newly acquired property. Thus, Arvin and the rest of the Brauer boys were left with nothing but their clothes and their father’s indomitable will to work.

  Following his father’s death, Arvin had traveled from his home in Schlüsselburg first east-south-east to Hannover, and then onward to Berlin. It was in the shadow of war and revolution, of Prussian expansionism, of enlightened Haskalah and itinerant artisanship, with his sickly wife, Tabea, in tow – now pregnant with Dustin – that he found himself one day in the company of another young brewer named Jacob Stieglitz, and his life forever changed.

  I can see him still, sitting in that worker’s hall in West Berlin, enjoying a bowl of chicken soup, when he entered into conversation with the pale-faced Jacob who had just come in from Leipzig to the south.

  “I am only here for a little time, perhaps a month,” said Jacob, sucking a bone. “I’ve already lost two brothers and a sister to the pogroms. And there are precious few master brewers who will hire a Jew, as you’ll find out . . . soon enough.”

  “Where are you going?” Arvin asked.

  “To America.”

  “America!” Arvin had heard of America, of course. But this land of promise and opportunity seemed as elusive and unattainable as Zion – the aspired homeland of all Jews. “But it is so far,” he said.

  “My granduncle, David, emigrated there some twenty years ago. To Minnesota.”

  “What is Minn-e-so-ta?”

  Jacob Stieglitz laughed. “You are a Hinterwäldler, aren’t you?”

  Arvin was hurt. As a Maskilim, he felt he was better educated than most artisans. “I have studied,” he answered rather churlishly. He was no hick.

  Stieglitz relented. He dropped his chicken bone into his bowl, glanced about the table, and reached into his ragged coat. “Here,” he said, removing a tattered piece of paper. He laid it carefully on the table. The paper was yellowed with age.

  It appeared to be some kind of poster with the picture of a great steam locomotive in the center. The word, “WANTED” was emblazoned across the top.

  “You do know how to read?” Stieglitz said.

  “Of course.” Arvin picked up the paper. It was a work notice of some kind, issued by . . . it was hard to read the word: the Minn-e-so-ta Territory. WANTED. LOOKING FOR ABLE-BODIED MEN WHO DREAM OF FREEDOM AND A BETTER LIFE TO WORK UPON THE NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILWAY . . . At the bottom was the flamboyant signature of a man named Eugene Burnand, Commissioner of Emigration.

  Stieglitz reached out, picked up the poster delicately, and began to fold it once again. “I know what you’re thinking. I know it’s old. It was my granduncle’s. But it takes a long time to build a railroad across a country like America. I’ve heard they still need men. What can you do besides brewing?”

  Arvin shrugged. “I’m good with my hands. As long as it’s honest, I don’t care what kind of work I do. My wife is pregnant and–”

  “Your wife!” said Stieglitz. He rolled his eyes and laughed. “Oh, no. No wives, my friend. They want only men. Single men.” With that he popped the poster back into his coat. “Come,” he added. “They will be calling out the jobs soon.” He stood and belched and patted his stomach with a loving tenderness. “If you don’t get a spot in front, you don’t work,” he added blithely. Then he was gone.

  Arvin tried to follow him through the busy hall, but Stieglitz disappeared into the throng. He moved like a freshwater eel, gliding between the dirty, coat-clad workers.

  Later that night, after failing to secure a new job, after watching dozens of other men picked by the steward all around him, Arvin trudged back to the tiny boarding house where he had left Tabea. It was a cold and windy night. The stars swirled in the heavens above him and he dreamed about the Minnesota Territory. Perhaps, he thought, it would be prudent to travel on alone. Some men left their families behind while they carved out a place for them in the new world. But the idea of leaving the sickly Tabea behind in Germany filled him with dread. Her pregnancy had only made her weaker, and he already felt guilty for making her with child.

  He heard the screaming as he turned the corner. The boardinghouse was still a good fifty yards away, but there was no mistaking the sound of Tabea’s voice. Arvin sprinted down the cobblestones, punched through the door and barreled up the stairs.

  Tabea was lying on the bed in the room they shared with seven other migrant workers. A single candle burned behind her, barely illuminating her heart-shaped face, those dark brown eyes – that would be Dustin’s – and her long black curly tresses.

  A portly midwife stood beside the bed, her hands blotched red with blood. As he entered the room, the midwife turned. She recognized him instantly. “I did everything I could,” she said preemptively. “But the baby . . . he breached.”

  Arvin dropped onto his knees. He took his wife’s face into his hands and turned her gently toward him. Tabea’s eyes were glassy, distant. She seemed to be looking through him at the wall. “Tabea,” he whispered, brushing at her hair. “Tabea?”

  “She cannot hear you,” the midwife said. She wiped her hands across her apron. “You are too late. But here,” she said, bending down toward a bundle on the floor. “Your son.” She lifted the pile of rags, and Arvin saw him for the first time. Even then, Dustin looked like his mother. He mewed and stirred.

  Arvin stared down at Tabea. He felt his heart tear down the center. He closed her eyes. Then, with a mighty sigh, he reached out for the boy. His hands were heavy as two stones. He drew the baby toward his chest. Dustin stirred and looked up at his father. And even though he knew it was impossible, Arvin felt as though the barely opened eyes rebuked him, saying, “Be careful of what you wish for, Father . . . ”

  Arvin looked once more at his dead wife, her face pale as white marble. He looked down at his child.

  “What will you name him?” said the midwife, trying to change the subject. She began to gather up her things matter-of-factly. Death was a companion to her work. The angel hovered over everyone.

  Arvin glanced out the window. It had started to snow. He could see large white flakes descending through the night. “Dustin,” he said. “It means Dark Stone.”

  * * *

  All of these events, once simply the fare of table chatter, became known to me as I watched Arvin Brauer stumble through the streets of New York City – first to St. Mark’s, then to the city morgue, and finally to the adjacent Charities Pier on Twenty-sixth Street. How they became known to me – as I dangled upside down, pinned to the General Slocum – was then and is still a great mystery to me. I simply knew them. I didn’t know the Brauer family well, except for Dustin. But as I swept down through the airless streets and found myself inside of Arvin Brauer, all that had made him who he was welled up inside of me.

  I can still taste the zebra mussels that he pined for as a young boy every Tuesday evening back in Schlüsselburg, with the flavor of wild onions, and the briny broth Arvin reduced over his potbellied stove in their small house by the Weser River, only a stone’s-throw distance from the castle of the Weser Hills, founded by the Minden bishop Gottfried von Waldeck in the fou
rteenth century.

  How do I know all this? It is so much, and yet it does not overwhelm me.

  And the castle, with its bulbous towers and red-tiled roof, how do I know that it was once the residence of the bishops of Minden, named after holy Petrus, the patron saint of the diocese Minden, transformed into a princedom in 1648?

  Perhaps I linger in these memories just to avoid the stench of rotting flesh. Perhaps it is to turn away, to block the crowd of relatives, grief-stricken, anxious, or bereft, who gather by the doorway to the warehouse, waiting for their turn to peer at death.

  Chapter 3

  June 15, 1904

  Twenty-sixth Street, New York City

  The warehouse floor was wet, glazed with the constant dripping of block ice, hauled in to keep decay at bay. It ran the length of two long city blocks. The walls were lined with windows in two rows, triptychs of glass, illuminated trinities, repeating almost endlessly, revealing knots of people gathering, barely formed crowds – a brother here, a father, son, a sister with her children there – the shattered faces peering at the rows of corpses laid out in pine coffins. How strange it was to see the dead already fitted in their Sunday best, as if instead of readying for a picnic, we had known – somehow – that it would end like this. We were ausarbeiten, prepared, decked out and primped and coiffed for death by our own hands.

  As Arvin entered the warehouse, an official from the coroner’s office stepped up and asked him if he had filled out a death certificate. “What’s that?” he said, cracking his reverie. “No,” he protested, pushing back. “I mean, I don’t know,” he continued, moving off. That’s when he first saw Otto Goldstein, the owner of the Golden Rose, and next to him, his bowler off, and his eyes puffed up and red from crying, my father – Leonard Meer. Beside them, sitting down, was mother and Louisa, and little Helmuth, safe and sound.