by Stephen King
“After you?” Phillip sat up. He’d been reclining with his head in David’s lap while his lover stroked his hair. “Or before?”
“Ah! So there were others!” David smiled mischievously. His eyes crinkled up in that winning way he had. David had always had an elfin cast to his smile, slightly devilish yet inviting at the same time. The expression had instantly captured Phillip’s heart the moment he’d first seen the younger man sitting in the first row of his graduate class at university. How he had ached to see it again!
Playfully, Phillip punched him in the arm.
“Tricks. On occasion. You wouldn’t know about this, obviously, but as one gets older, one sometimes has to pay.”
“Really?” David’s eyes grew round with affected shock and he pressed his fingers to the center of his chest like an old spinster. “How sordid!”
Phillip chuckled. “It was only a few times. Never satisfying. As years went on …” He shrugged. “The need grew less. After all …” He lay his head back in David’s lap and reached up to stroke his lover’s cheek. “I spent thirteen years with the best. How could anyone follow your act?”
“I’m sorry,” David said, serious now.
“For what?” Phillip abandoned his efforts to recapture the quiet intimacy they’d shared all morning, and sat up fully. Apparently, David had something important on his mind.
“For leaving you so soon,” he all but whispered.
“As if it was your fault?” Phillip clasped both of David’s hands and looked into his eyes. “As if it was any of our faults.”
They sat for a while, hand in hand like that, simply enjoying their nearness to each other.
“Life,” Phillip said after a long silence, “was not always fair.”
David looked at him, questioning, but said nothing.
“You missed the worst of it, thank goodness. And toward the end—of my days, not yours—things were changing, altering with frightening speed.”
“For the better, I hope.”
Phillip shrugged. “I suppose. After you were taken from me, I didn’t pay a lot of attention. We needn’t concern ourselves with that any more. We’re together now. It almost makes me believe in God.”
“A slut and an atheist!” David kidded.
“I couldn’t bear it without you,” Phillip told him, seriously. “Not again.”
“Maybe ,” David said and leaned his head on Phillip’s shoulder, “this is our reward. So much was taken from us. A half inch of respite was the least the universe could repay us. We were owed.”
Months passed and soon, a few years had gone. In that time, the two lovers had the luxury of connecting as few mortals do, spending hours conversing. Sometimes the matters they discussed were profound, at other times they concerned themselves with trivial things. And while it was inevitable that they would, each limited by his own restricted territory, come to know the spirits of their respective neighbors, they spent the vast majority of their time together, loving each other as best they could.
Yet their existence did not continue entirely uninterrupted; there was ever the occasional incident or event.
Ruth Meinster’s daughter-in-law joined them and the two women did not get along. Phillip amused David, who was out of range, with stories of their squabbling, most of which centered around the antics of Dr. Seth Meinster, Ruth’s son. Uproar resulted when the good doctor showed up to pay his respects to his late wife with his new bride in tow. A bottle-blond Italian Catholic, she briefly united mother and daughter-in-law in their outrage until the intensity of their emotion faded into mere grumbling discontentment.
A teenaged girl was with them briefly, perhaps nine months in all. A welcome companion to young Brian, a lonely lad who had died in a mid-century car crash, she was the only other young person buried within Phillip and David’s shared range. Brian doted on her; at last someone had arrived with whom he had something in common, even though their living days were separated by almost fifty years. When she was exhumed for reasons that no one knew, and the grave was left permanently empty, Brian was desolate. But within a week or so, he was once again his stand-offish self, lurking in moody isolation, rarely moving more than a yard away from where his bronze nameplate was slowly being obscured by weeds.
That was the thing, David told Phillip. The Dead seemed unable to maintain strong emotion for long. Passions could be roused, but they faded quickly. Once again, the two men were confronted with how blessed they were. Their love was deep but unassuming, tender but not exciting, stalwart but not forceful. In death, the two men relaxed into caring for each other again as a matter of course, placidly and without turmoil or angst. Perhaps Death was grateful for the lack of drama and, in return, granted them the peace they felt they had earned.
They were finally content. Life could throw them no more curve balls. No longer did they care what anyone thought. If the act of sex was an impossibility, more casual intimacy was not; in the simplicity of tender caresses and soft whispers, the raucousness of an orgasm seemed less vital and not as necessary in comparison.
Of course, there were times when merely being together by itself grew tedious. When that happened, they gossiped like sorority girls, swapping anecdotes of those of the cemetery’s denizens that the other could not see. The area immediately surrounding Phillip’s headstone consisted of perhaps thirty graves and a small mausoleum. David’s stone was adjacent to a section of smaller plots where cremains were interred, gleaning him closer to fifty spirits with whom he could interact if he chose. There was enough fodder so that trading quips at the expense of their neighbors’ various machinations and squabbles became an amusing way to forestall boredom when it threatened.
For some time, Fate was kind to them, perhaps almost long enough to equal the balance of the lifetime together that they had been denied. But as the weathered inscription above the door to Tyler McInniny’s mausoleum should have reminded them: NOTHING LASTS FOREVER.
None of the ghosts felt the earthquake physically, of course. Yet some found themselves caught up in the drama of the event and echoed the cries of alarm of the Living. For most though, watching the violent upheaval was nothing more than a welcome and entertaining novelty.
All across the cemetery the terrain shifted and warped. The more mature and stately trees fought the undulations, shedding weaker limbs in a shower of leaves and shards of bark while their less venerable companions merely swayed to weather the violence. A miniature tidal wave crashed against the embankment surrounding the lake; the water undermined the roots and, before it toppled, great swathes of earth crumbled and washed away.
The shaking was so bad that, when it ceased, some of the grave markers no longer precisely matched the identities of the deceased who had originally been buried beneath them. Less obviously, below the sod handfuls of earth invaded spaces previously occupied by naught but stale pockets of air and desiccated bones. Aged moisture-rotted coffins splintered, and the remains within them were jostled to and fro. Even the concrete burial vaults were not immune. Unable to withstand the rocking, some cracked and flung shards of stone to the surface to lie with jagged edges poking above the grass.
Eventually the landscape settled and everyone’s excitement diminished. Though the rearrangement of boundaries was a nice change for many, all too soon the less welcome effects of the cataclysm began to make themselves known.
Mrs. Susskind was gone, vanished entirely when her grave was washed into the lake and her casket sank out of range. The McInniny crypt was reduced to rubble. And Phillip mourned to see that the bench he and David shared was damaged beyond repair. The marble uprights had cracked and one side of the slab had fallen and leaned crazily a-kilter, clearly unsafe for any mortal being to sit upon.
It was a sad, pathetic sight, made more so when Phillip realized that the little bench had come to hold a deep significance for him. It was here that he and David had first been reunited and it had become a symbol of their togetherness. Though the caretakers would undoubtedly
replace it, he would be sorry to see it go and, no matter what they erected in its stead, he would always hold the memory of the original in his heart.
It took a while for Phillip to become aware of the gravamen of the change. Some of the others, of course, realized immediately but hesitated to point it out to him. After the earthquake subsided, Phillip sat on the bench, waiting long into evening. His concern, when David failed to arrive, was mild. It had happened before. Every so often, one or the other of them had drifted off into his own mental fog for a while, unaware of the passage of time; the Dead are not so fixated upon the measuring of hours and minutes and seconds as are the Living. For them to fail to meet was uncommon, but not unknown.
Days passed and, sometime within that span, Phillip allowed the knowledge to sink in. At one point, Minnie Briskin braved an approach and offered to ferry messages back and forth but Phillip didn’t respond. It was as if he had moved beyond all of their boundaries, as if he could neither hear nor see even the closest of his fellow specters.
“It makes no sense,” he thought, bitterly. “Some people are taken in their prime. Others of us are forced to linger beyond anything we thought we could endure. It’s all so senseless. Senseless and … arbitrary.”
Another flash of resentment overtook him but he impatiently repressed it.
True, their life together had been all too brief. In death, they had been given a second chance. If both were fated to be equally as brief, so be it. David would never truly leave him, nor would he leave David.
Even now, he imagined him standing just a few inches away with his hand stretched out. Phillip rose from the shattered remains of the bench and dared a few steps toward David’s grave until he came up short. He pressed his hand against the invisible wall that he must needs accept though he could not understand it.
He stood there for a very long time. Was there a matching pressure from the other side of the barrier? Was there the slightest bit of warmth against his palm? Did he hear, almost imperceptibly, a sigh of grief that matched his own?
He rested his cheek against the spot. And waited …
FOLIE à DEUX ( THE MADNESS OF TWO)
SYDNEY LEIGH
Under a thin veil of harvest light,
your hand goes cold in mine
Your skin becomes that of the moon itself—
I touch your cratered face,
hear the faint echo
of a heart let loose inside your chest.
There is a weightlessness here
with which we are unfamiliar.
We search for water that isn’t there
for life in a place where we are
alone.
This lunar love
will not last—
it is an insincere
and fabricated
as the Sea of Vapors
in which we dissolve.
For days we wander,
waiting for the eclipse—
for others
to see
what we are.
WINDOWS, MIRRORS, DOORS
JASON V BROCK
I
THE APOCALYPSE arrived on a Tuesday. At least for Marion.
However, this was not some 9/11-type catastrophe, or the collapse of civilization due to a global pandemic. No, she had learned real apocalypses were always personal. They always involved a cast of characters, too. Sometimes just one, but frequently extras … though never more than required. The circumstances—the inciting events, the setting, and so on—just served as a backdrop for the emotional and psychic dramaturgy which encapsulated that most human and elusive of all cosmic principles: the moment. Additionally, and ironically, said moment is different for everyone, even those who come to share it due to accidents of fate.
For Marion, it was the death of her identical twin sister on a stark, bitterly cold Tuesday morning. The cast had included her, Annette, the doctors and nurses; the last act took place in the hospice, and the catalyst had been her sister’s cancer, which set those final performances into motion—piecemeal scenes that would eventually devolve into a protracted and painful melodrama saddled with a poorly scripted, wholly unsatisfactory finale.
Who writes these things? Marion sometimes wondered, and with more than a touch of sarcasm.
Another thing she came to understand after Annette’s loss was that these private apocalypses were not always quick; in many situations, they were slow—in her case the leisurely unraveling of the threads of a life over the span of more than thirty years. Yes, death can be quick, binary—one moment living, the next not. Nevertheless, the end of all things for the individuals who survive such trauma—the demise of a loved one; a disaster, manmade or natural—often takes much longer to resolve … frequently months or years, if ever.
Slow and steady. But the race is never won, she reflected.
Of course, Marion had not come to these conclusions through any sudden epiphany; it was experienced as a gradual dawning … more precisely an erosion. An implacable, sinister loss of color in the day-to-day machinations of existence as the bubble of her daily life shrank in influence and experience. It would all perhaps end horribly, as is the way with reality, but for a long time she tried to concern herself chiefly with the possibility of new beginnings, with the mystery of a fresh, if unwelcome, start—spinning the anguish and pain into a different worldview she had not previously considered. After a time, this faux optimism subsided, and she eventually realized that the finality is what truly mattered. That was where the lesson was to be found, she mused. Endings only become apparent in retrospect; in the moment, the events as they are happening seem as impermanent as any others that precede them, or those that inevitably follow. Only with hindsight does the true gravity of the delineation between the world before and the world after become comprehensible.
In the final analysis, the grind and joy of anyone’s life comes down to a few bullet points, she decided, at most a couple of paragraphs highlighting a few key moments:
- Birth—shared with Annette …
- Education—first in public school, then through scholarships to some excellent colleges to feed the fire for performance …
- Career—traveling the world as an actor of stage, TV, and film …
- Marriage—to Nick, the alcoholic New Yorker, ending after just a year; then, in 1985, to my Southern gentleman, Eric, with his troubled, gifted son, Patrick …
- Children—dear, sweet Patrick, who went to Australia as a young man before finally leaving us for good …
- Loss—of my beloved Eric to an aneurysm; my parents to old age; Annette to cancer; my career to depression and anxiety; of friends through attrition; of youth and vitality …
- Death—the great unknown for anyone, and, unlike birth, without the comfort of my lovely twin …
In her more cynical moods, Marion questioned why it all mattered. Live long enough and everyone loses everything: friends, family, health, perhaps their mind … eventually even life itself. Just as some creatures thrive in shadow, shunning the light, avoiding the attention of others, so do others prosper at the margins of society, at the interface between the darkness and light. At one time, she had been one such creature of the sun … after Annette’s passing, she found her world increasingly pulled into the waiting blackness. A piece of her died that day, and the hole that was created had continued to spread throughout her being ever so gradually. She struggled to stay at the interface as best she could; it was not easy, as she grew older, as the losses compounded, as the light receded. She coped as best she could, but sometimes it was like awakening from a coma into a completely unlit room: it was difficult to make sense out of what had become of her life in such a context.
Left to her own devices, she passively observed the world as its pace quickened and her enthusiasm waned; it frequently left her feeling like an insect, a kind of drone. Drones understood—either through cognizance or intuition—their place, their role in society. Insect societies were brutal, efficient hierarchi
es, she understood, but they were not rooted in vendetta or spite; the caste was established at birth, and was impervious to negotiation. The individual supplicated to the group hive mind, the collective enterprise of survival. In many ways, Marion admired this simple, methodical approach to life; it required no insight, no conscious thought, and did not reward devious or Machiavellian behavior. No individual was more important than any other and all members were independent of the social constraints and expectations of some egomaniacal leader or the vanity of a clique. Yet, even a drone had purpose. Increasingly, Marion felt no such impulse; it was as though she were being controlled by an outside force, or had become an imposter within her own body, manipulated from without by an alien consciousness which influenced her actions, and—ever more—her reactions, like some master puppeteer, an irony she found by turns bemusing and disconcerting. She was an actor, and actors were, in some ways, simply puppets, vessels, tabulae rasae, for the roles they inhabit. While this was true enough, she was beginning to feel less like a vessel and more like the literal text—as though she had no meaning unless imbued by some external proxy speaking the words aloud. When she looked in the mirror in the mornings, she recognized herself less and less, and worried that one day the last speck of her self-conception would simply vanish as she mundanely cleaned her face—as though her physical being might melt away into the spiral of the emptying sink, taking her humanity and soul along with it.