by Stephen King
She shook her head.
“And when I told you to let go you … you just did it? ”
She nodded.
“Kitty, how could you do that?”
She looked at me with those deep blue eyes. “I knew you must have been doing something to fix it,” she said. “You’re my big brother. I knew you’d take care of me.”
“Oh, Kitty, you don’t know how close it was.”
I had put my hands over my face. She sat up and took them away. She kissed my cheek. “No,” she said. “But I knew you were down there. Gee, am I sleepy. I’ll see you tomorrow, Larry. I’m going to have a cast, Dr. Pedersen says.”
She had the cast on for a little less than a month, and all her classmates signed it—she even got me to sign it. And when it came off, that was the end of the barn incident. My father replaced the ladder up to the third loft with a new strong one, but I never climbed up to the beam and jumped off into the haymow again. So far as I know, Kitty didn’t either.
It was the end, but somehow not the end. Somehow it never ended until nine days ago, when Kitty jumped from the top story of an insurance building in Los Angeles. I have the clipping from The L.A. Times in my wallet. I guess I’ll always carry it, not in the good way you carry snapshots of people you want to remember or theater tickets from a really good show or part of the program from a World Series game. I carry that clipping the way you carry something heavy, because carrying it is your work. The headline reads: CALL GIRL SWAN-DIVES TO HER DEATH.
We grew up. That’s all I know, other than facts that don’t mean anything. She was going to go to business college in Omaha, but in the summer after she graduated from high school, she won a beauty contest and married one of the judges. It sounds like a dirty joke, doesn’t it? My Kitty.
While I was in law school she got divorced and wrote me a long letter, ten pages or more, telling me how it had been, how messy it had been, how it might have been better if she could have had a child. She asked me if I could come. But losing a week in law school is like losing a term in liberal-arts undergraduate. Those guys are greyhounds. If you lose sight of the little mechanical rabbit, it’s gone forever.
She moved to L.A. and got married again. When that one broke up I was out of law school. There was another letter, a shorter one, more bitter. She was never going to get stuck on that merry-go-round, she told me. It was a fix job. The only way you could catch the brass ring was to tumble off the horse and crack your skull. If that was what the price of a free ride was, who wanted it? PS, Can you come, Larry? It’s been a while.
I wrote back and told her I’d love to come, but I couldn’t. I had landed a job in a high-pressure firm, low guy on the totem pole, all the work and none of the credit. If I was going to make it up to the next step, it would have to be that year. That was my long letter, and it was all about my career.
I answered all of her letters. But I could never really believe that it was really Kitty who was writing them, you know, no more than I could really believe that the hay was really there … until it broke my fall at the bottom of the drop and saved my life. I couldn’t believe that my sister and the beaten woman who signed “Kitty” in a circle at the bottom of the letters were really the same person. My sister was a girl with pigtails, still without breasts.
She was the one who stopped writing. I’d get Christmas cards, birthday cards, and my wife would reciprocate. Then we got divorced and I moved and just forgot. The next Christmas and the birthday after, the cards came through the forwarding address. The first one. And I kept thinking: Gee, I’ve got to write Kitty and tell her that I’ve moved. But I never did.
But as I’ve told you, those are facts that don’t mean anything. The only things that matter are that we grew up and she swanned from that insurance building, and that Kitty was the one who always believed the hay would be there. Kitty was the one who had said, “I knew you must be doing something to fix it.” Those things matter. And Kitty’s letter.
People move around so much now, and it’s funny how those crossed-off addresses and change-of-address stickers can look like accusations. She’d printed her return address in the upper left corner of the envelope, the place she’d been staying at until she jumped. A very nice apartment building on Van Nuys. Dad and I went there to pick up her things. The landlady was nice. She had liked Kitty.
The letter was postmarked two weeks before she died. It would have gotten to me a long time before, if not for the forwarding addresses. She must have gotten tired of waiting.
Dear Larry,
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately … and what I’ve decided is that it would have been better for me if that last rung had broken before you could put the hay down.
Your,
Kitty
Yes, I guess she must have gotten tired of waiting. I’d rather believe that than think of her deciding I must have forgotten. I wouldn’t want her to think that, because that one sentence was maybe the only thing that would have brought me on the run.
But not even that is the reason sleep comes so hard now. When I close my eyes and start to drift off, I see her coming down from the third loft, her eyes wide and dark blue, her body arched, her arms swept up behind her.
She was the only one who always knew the hay would be there.
FAIL-SAFE
JONATHAN BALOG
At 33,000 feet, a star falls with no brakes
Look up, and watch a single spark
Descend toward a billion identical points
See, distance is an equalizer
From far enough away, everything looks the same
At 25,000 feet, epiphany kicks in,
Bringing neurons to a boil
Lateral thought hides under a wing
And coping mechanisms fire into the dark
From here, hindsight is something we’ve outgrown
At 9,000 feet, the city is fit with brass shoes
Movements are weighed by a dreamlike slowness
As distance becomes anathema
Becomes the worst enemy we’ve ever had
As if someone had thrown time itself into the quicksand
At 2,000 feet, equations collapse
Consciousness is dragged kicking and screaming
Toward whatever passes for a center these days
And the future clears its schedule to make way
For a calm that rushes over everything
A RIFT IN REFLECTION
HAL BODNER
DEATH WAS NOT nearly the frightening experience that Phillip feared it would be. No devils awakened him into the hereafter with prodding pitchforks intent on avenging his sins. He found no purgatory, nor any other form of Stygian psychoanalysis to help him work through his unresolved corporeal issues. No beings of purity awaited to clothe him in white robes so that his voice could join in singing praises to a Heavenly Father in which he never really believed.
Contrariwise, death was a languid and easy existence, a simple state of being. It triggered the fond memory of a lazy picnic he and David had shared many years ago. Pleasantly stuffed on runny cheese, pâté spread on crusty bread and a veritable harvest of fresh berries, the two of them had quaffed just enough Riesling to be lightly tipsy. Some hour or two after the bottle was finished, they sprawled in the afterglow while the late afternoon sun slowly dried their sweat slicked bodies, limbs intertwined, half asleep and content.
If pressed, Phillip would say he was contented in death—quite a different experience from what he’d known before he crossed over. Life had often been a trial. If he accurately interpreted the behavior of the still-living who sometimes visited the graveyard, these new generations were quite open about who they chose to love. But in Phillip’s day, clandestine assignations were required and an unceasing aura of oppressiveness was the norm. One’s job, one’s family, one’s home, even one’s liberty was constantly at stake, not to mention the possibility of being badly beaten merely if you carelessly took the wrong route home from a bar and w
ere attacked for no other reason than that you were wearing the wrong clothing.
David had been younger, less reserved, more willing to take risks. He was always an inveterate marcher, an eager protestor, an industrious gatherer of signatures on petitions, even before the Plague Years. He often did things that Phillip tried, but failed, to understand. But even David knew the wisdom of caution, of not flaunting what he was when he was in dangerous surroundings.
Death changed all that. There was no longer any need for such fusses. The pervasive, smothering fears were gone. The politicking was moot for such as he and David, best left to those who still breathed and cared about those things. No longer did he wake each morning, his chest tight with anxiety until he had searched every millimeter of his body, breath held in anticipation of spying a dreaded purple spot or obsessively measuring a mole he’d had for years to see if it had grown bigger. No more did he explosively thrash in the bedclothes, jolted into terrified wakefulness by a dream that David was gone, only to waken fully to the mechanical hiss of air from the guestroom and the oppressive knowledge that the nightmare had already arrived.
The not knowing had been the worst. The horrific six months of vomit and shit and sweat and stink had been horrible, populated as they were with nurses swathed head-to-toe in surgical masks and gowns and rubber gloves like neurotic mummies. Yes, those times had been bad, worse than bad. But at least, death offered a finite end. It was the times that came before which had everyone in an agony of pins and needles while they waited.
Until someone developed a test, an atmosphere of furtiveness pervaded as if by not drawing attention, one could somehow avoid the consequences of a becoming a target. Yet, unbeknownst to so many, the Mark of Caine had already figuratively been painted on their foreheads. Perhaps selfishly, Phillip breathed a little easier after that. But for David, a biomedical Sword of Damocles loomed, poised to sever so very many young lives.
By the time a course of treatment was finally announced it was too late for David. Not that it would have mattered. The early regimens failed, as did the next, and the ones after that. Toward the end of his own much longer life, long after his old friends who had survived the first wave had grown numb to tragedy, or perhaps just complacent, Phillip heard murmurings of “manageability” and “preventative” therapies, and even more vague promises of vaccines on the horizon.
But by that time, thirty-odd years had flown and Phillip was tired. Not just physically; the unceasing mental stress had taken its toll as well. When his time came, he welcomed it and he received an unexpected gift that he had never dared hope to experience again. In death, Phillip once again could be carefree.
There were limitations, of course. The Universe was not without its rules, no matter how arbitrary. When he arrived, he’d pestered the others for a reason, an answer to the question - why? Why were they limited to such a narrow radius of existence, a perfect circle with a radius of exactly twenty-three feet, four and three-quarter inches from the center of each burial plot? Outside of that perimeter, while they could still see the Living, the Dead were blind to other Dead.
It made for small communities and, since most of the Dead no longer cherished the major prejudices and anxieties of the Living, there was little conflict between them. What gripes they shared were petty ones. Though most of the older Dead had lapsed into restive slumber, some of them lay where a large number of cremains were interred. Inevitably, the cemetery echoed with querulous complaints about people’s rest being disturbed each time a funeral party showed up bearing urns containing the ashes of new arrivals. Others, whose plots were located in full burial areas, bemoaned the lack of variety. They hardly could have been happy being stuck with the same thirty or so companions throughout eternity.
Every day, Phillip took a few moments to appreciate how lucky he was to have given in to David’s pestering. Back then, two unrelated men generally did not purchase cemetery plots together. While the attempt to do so was not entirely unheard of, it was distinctly queer—in both senses of the word. Had they tried, it was likely that the cemetery would have rejected them entirely. David urged him to take the chance but Phillip was never comfortable with the idea.
In the end, they compromised. They purchased a pair of plots which, while they were not side-by-side, they deemed to be close enough. They arranged two headstones of identical design as well, seeking to surreptitiously mimic the physical togetherness that they feared the cemetery staff might have denied them had they tried to establish it more overtly.
Life had never been easy for the two men, though Phillip had more difficulty adjusting than his younger partner. At first, they lived with mandatory secrecy and the fear of discovery; they lived knowing that a small slip up could yield violent repercussions. Later, they lived ostracized and rejected by family and friends. They continued to live in hiding so that they could maintain a roof over their heads and put food on the table. They lived with caution, unwilling to compliment neighbors on what fine, handsome sons they had for fear of it being taken the wrong way, averting their eyes when taking in sports events lest their expressions be accurately interpreted as containing admiration for more than the mere skill of the athletes. In the end, of course, they lived as lepers, diseased pariahs. And once David was gone, Phillip lived in loneliness, managing to eke out a drudgery of existence for another few decades before the pain at last subsided.
Perhaps in some cosmic penance for all the obstacles Life had thrown into their paths, Fate smiled upon them in death. By sheerest luck, Phillip and David’s plots were located exactly forty six feet and nine inches away from each other.
Forty-six feet and nine inches.
With a full half inch margin to spare.
Joy was his over-riding emotion now, but it was a gentle thing, not the frenetic hullabaloo of mortal jubilation. When his spirit first rose from the grave and he realized where and what he was, he made a beeline toward David’s plot. Those few moments along the way while he crossed those twenty-some feet were sheer agony, half convinced as he was that his new state of being was unique or, if not, that David’s ghost was long gone.
“David?” He called out hesitantly when he reached the end of his invisible tether and could go no further. “It’s Phillip. I’m here sweetheart. I’m here at last.”
A short eternity seemed to pass until a beloved form took shape, no longer ravaged by cancer and wasted away, restored to the seeming vigor of his youth. It was the man he had first known, first loved, unseen except in his dearest dreams for more than thirty years, returned to him at last.
Phillip was not unaware of some of the other specters around them, most going about their own business but some few watching curiously. Though he felt a faint pang of unease, a discomfort at any blatant impropriety, in his initial excitement at seeing David again, he flung his arms around his lover, for once unable to muster concern about what strangers might think. Though neither of them could truly feel the embrace, it was enough. Finally, they shared a moment, however brief, of quiet bliss.
A quartet of mature women stood watching, two of them were able to see the entire reunion, a third was restricted to observing Phillip alone. The last could see nothing.
“Look at that.” Mrs. Briskin, who was buried under the rose bush gently prodded Mrs. Susskind, who had a plot right up against the lake, with her elbow. “Young love,” she said with affection.
“Love?” Mrs. Susskind’s eyebrows rose. “The fegalehs?”
“Goldie!” Mrs. Briskin chastised her friend. “Such language! It’s a new world out there.”
The other woman shrugged. “If you say so, Minnie. If you ask me, after Goldwater lost, the whole country went kaput.” She snorted with a kind of amused disgust, a sound that was unique to Jewish widows of a certain age.
“What’s going on?” Esther Futterman whined. “I’m out of range.”
She tugged at Ruth Meinster’s sleeve.
“Don’t ask me,” Ruth replied. “As far as I can see, he’s
hugging air.”
Minnie Briskin ignored them in favor of continuing her argument with Goldie Susskind.
“You’re telling me, if your Harry wasn’t buried in Florida, you wouldn’t get a little excited?”
“If my Harry ever looked like that,” Mrs. Susskind pointed to David’s youthful muscular figure and, incidentally, scored the winning conversational point, “… My whole life would have been excited.”
“Live and let live,” Ruth advised her friends, without realizing the irony. “Just live and let live.”
The first pair of old biddies wandered off, followed by Mrs. Futterman complaining to Ruth Meister in their wake. The other ghosts steered clear of David and Phillip as well, respecting their privacy for now. Reunions were not uncommon, but they were few and far between. As this part of the cemetery slowly filled and ran out of room for new interments, they would eventually cease altogether. The current occupants knew this and, consequently, they cherished the novelty of these increasingly rare meetings while keeping their distance so as not to spoil their new neighbors’ moments of discovery. There would be plenty of time later to gossip over the details.
“You look …” Phillip breathed, amazed at David’s restoration.
“As do you, Phil,” he replied. “Not a day over forty.”
“Seventy-three,” Phillip snorted, a little embarrassed by the compliment.
“None of that matters now.”
The two men soon settled into a routine. Between their graves, roughly equidistant, there was a small marble funerary bench. For hours on end, the two men perched upon it, talking, holding hands and reminiscing. Amongst the other spirits, it was soon acknowledged as David and Phillip’s special meeting spot, and they largely refrained from intruding upon the lovers’ privacy.
“Wasn’t there ever anyone else?” David asked one day.