by Michael Hale
“Now, what I want you to do is try to imagine yourself floating, about two feet above the chair, then when you feel comfortable with that, another two feet—then try to see if you can get up near the ceiling, or even further if you can—up into the room above. There’s something up there—a target. I’m going to give you about twenty minutes, then bring you out of it, have you describe it all. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get very far today—like anything else, it takes practice.”
She put headphones over his ears—he heard the slow crash of waves, then a gentle voice, her voice, taking him through relaxation exercises. His first inclination was to resist—he’d spent all his life doing it. But he felt obliged to play along, so he took a few deep breaths and let it all wash over him—the sea soundscape, the sunset glow; there was a nostalgic comfort to it all. His earliest memories were tinged and textured with a background shimmer of other people’s thoughts and feelings, the chatter of conversations just out of earshot. It all came back to him, a rustling swell of them.
Her voice on the tape again, telling him to rise out of the chair. He lost his sense of where his body ended and where it began. The cushion support was imperceptible now. His extremities dissolved into a tingling displacement. And the light shifted: the rosy glow turned yellow, then green, blue—then back to yellow.
“Rise out of the chair.” Jane’s voice in his ears: calming, but insistent.
It was as if someone had removed a pair of constricting goggles from his eyes; Peter could see with a clarity and crispness that made him think of the View-Master he’d had as a kid, the little stereoscopic camera toy that clicked through images of his favorite Disney characters, the colors lush and pristine. He’d always been disappointed about how flat the dwarfs or piglets looked in the foreground—compressed like cardboard cutouts set out in front of a contrived backdrop.
He found himself turning at will, rotating like an astronaut in free fall, till he could see himself lying on the couch, the Ping-Pong ball halves on his eyes, the headphones—an alien insect tied to the mass of himself. Me down there; me up here.
His earth-bound body shucked like an old coat, he let himself glide up to the ceiling—near a dusty light fixture. He could see flecks of something: two dead flies in the bowl of it as he passed it by, or through it. Now the texture of plaster, the taste of galvanized nails, the sawdust scent of wood framing; a line of itchiness as he passed through the electric cable. Then up through floorboards into the room above.
It was an attic space; he could make out the roof structure: exposed rafters coming together at a ridge beam that ran the length of the room. Diffuse light from a small, circular, louvered window at the gable end pooled around a box in the center of the bare floor. He was still rising; he was above the new floor level now, hovering belly-down, his arms limp at his sides. He brought his left hand around in front of his face. His watch was there with him, its second hand moving, the sleeve of his shirt rolled up past his wrist—all his clothing intact, replicated.
Peter turned to the box on the floor and willed himself closer: gray metal like the small one Thornquist had given him—with a hinged lid, unsealed this time. He reached out and his hand passed through the side of the box. He could see a faint green likeness of five fingers through the lid; it was as if the metal were made of a thin black ticking. He tried to lift the lid but his hand kept passing through it. He willed his body forward in a slow, clumsy somersault headfirst toward the box. His scalp tingled as it penetrated the sheet metal. His eyes were closed and he forced himself to open them. Which eyes? His own? Or these other out-of-body eyes? Darkness. Then the green glow of his own flesh and bone lighting up the confined space. And something else.
A small metal cylinder, like a short roll of quarters. He could see writing on the side of it, and a bulging raised seam running the length of it—a roll of film, 35mm. He could make out the Kodak logo now. Yes, definitely a roll of photographic film.
He pulled back out of the box. The line of sensation—a sheet of it cross-sectioning his brain—passed through his head and now his face; his lips were cold with it, chapped for an instant. And then he was floating back down through the ceiling again. He felt a shaft of dull ache as his knee grazed the electrical circuitry. It threw him into a spin. He was disoriented and tumbling blindly now . . . he fell back into his body. His own weight was like something new and impeding. A rosy glow filled his field of vision again, and Jane’s peaches-and-cream voice, lip-close to his ear, was talking him down.
He felt her hand on his forehead then; her long fingernails were gently picking at the surgical tape holding the Ping-Pong halves to his eyes. Her breathing, the sense of her torso next to him, reminded him of a dentist chair intimacy, or the intimacy you share with a woman in a salon washing your hair. His knee ached and his mouth was dry, talcum-powder dry. “You did great, Pete. Really good,” she said next to his ear.
“What? What happened?” he said, swallowing. He kept his eyes closed for a moment and focused on the feel of the chair, the pressure of the footrest under his calves. The tips of his fingers tingled and the dull ache in his knee returned when he moved his leg.
“You tell me,” she said, handing him a glass of water when he finally sat up. Reading his mind.
He tried to, after draining his glass: “A roll of film, am I right? In the box?”
“I don’t know. I’m not supposed to know. But that’s good. You seem pretty sure about it.”
“I think I was right inside the box at one point. My head, everything passed right through it. At least that’s what I thought was happening.” Peter eased himself out of the chair and filled his glass from the plastic bottle beside the monitor. “It was like I was really up there.” He winced and sat down again on the edge of the recliner. “Jesus, my leg still hurts, from when I went through the electric wire in the ceiling—I guess I was up there.”
“Only part of you was; your body was still down here, remember.” It was as if she were holding something back from him, some crucial piece of data. The way she turned away then and started fussing with things, the light over the chair and the pieces of tape she’d pulled from his face. He suddenly realized that he’d given something up, in the past minute or so—his reluctance to cooperate. He was intrigued by what had happened and he wanted to do it again, very soon. The pendulum had swung in their favor; he needed something from them now. Information, knowledge—and they were going to dole it out bit by bit.
“There was no chance of me not coming back, was there? Back into my body?”
3
That record by the Stones with the zipper on the cover . . .
Pamela Gilford grabbed the Hershey bar and headed to the back of the store, past the shelves of potato chips and taco chips, the dog food and detergent. She paused beside the wall-length cooler of soft drinks and juices only long enough to tear at the wrapper with her teeth and get some of the chocolate into her mouth before heading for the aisle with the cough medicine and toothpaste, for Tylenol and maybe some of those over-the-counter sleeping pills.
There. Much better: sugar and chocolate in her stomach now, in her blood soon, then the brain. Like falling in love, the Self magazine article had said: chocolate does the same thing to the chemicals in the brain, the endorphins or whatever, as meeting the man of your dreams.
She needed the chocolate because she didn’t want to think about what was in her bag—the letter from Calliope Associates—didn’t want to worry it into more than it was. She reached inside one more time, feeling it between her fingers, her thumb and index only a spaghetti strand apart but in her mind the distance was incalculable, the letter fat with promise and something else. She kept seeing Fourth of July fireworks from when she was a kid: Roman candles in her backyard; the bucket of sand like an inedible birthday cake; the pungent smoke, and the glaring incandescent reds and greens of chemical fire. Her mother would never let her get close enough, and certainly not let her light any of them. That had always s
eemed crucial to Pam—the act of setting it all in motion.
They wanted to interview her for a job, the Calliope letter said, a job she hadn’t applied for. It had to do with her psychic abilities. They had gotten her name from the psychic phone outfit she’d worked for a few months back. “Fortune 2000.”
She stuck the rest of the Hershey bar in her mouth and crouched down in the aisle to open her knapsack. Pam took the letter out and looked at the envelope again, at the return address: “Calliope Associates” in classy dark green type above a box number in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten, the Netherlands Antilles. An island somewhere in the Caribbean—she knew that much at least. They wanted her to phone a New York number and talk to someone about making all the arrangements. They were going to send her a plane ticket—all that way just for a job interview. She put the letter back in her bag and headed for the front of the store.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said when she got to the cash register.
“Yeah?”
“You think I’m just going to walk right out of here without paying for it, right?”
“Eating it in the store is like shoplifting.”
“Not if you pay for it.”
“You’re gonna pay for it?”
“Of course I’m going to pay for it. Jesus . . .”
Pamela took the bits of chocolate-bar wrapper out of her pocket and flattened them out on the counter beside the Tylenol and the sleeping pills. Especially the part with the bar code the kid needed to ring up on the till. No one knew the price of anything anymore, only when you’ve already bought it did they know the price.
He was taller than she was, but young. My God, she could see right through to how young he was . . . sixteen, almost seventeen, but big, muscular, on the wrestling team, a football player—he hated it, didn’t like the coach, but his girlfriend, a little thing, five foot one, maybe—“Wendy,” or—No. “Cindy,” her name was—thought it was cool dating a guy on the . . . his birthday next week, she was going to give him a . . . Pamela stopped herself. He was talking to her again.
“Excuse me, ma’am—”
“What?”
“Six seventy-three? For your stuff?”
She gave him two fives and he rang it in. After really looking at her money for a second, as if she were still getting away with something. A football player with a little gold stud in his earlobe. Macho macho man.
He handed her the change and when it touched her skin it was a line of hot oil running down her back.
That’s not fair. That’s not fair . . . a little boy that looks like him . . . not him, but his, years from now: his son . . . beside the pool, a Day-Glo green plastic something, a ball, no, a truck, one of those freebies from Burger King, in the pool floating away from his hand. Little sticky fingers—there’s chocolate on his fingers—reaching for it, the baby leaning too far over the edge: sky, blue, water . . . she never should have touched the wrapper, the change he gave her tying it all together . . .
“Shit, I hate this. . . .” She turned for the door, her hand up to her mouth, the musk smell of spent chocolate as she bit into her thumbnail, biting down hard, getting a purchase on a nice crescent moon of it, hesitating at the end, letting the paring hang against her tongue for a second, like a tiny claw, before peeling it away and spitting it out. A cat claw. There. Out of sight, out of . . . she used her knapsack to bump open the door.
“Meow,” she said to herself. Out into the street into the traffic, “MEEOOW-RR. A drawn-out, Siamese-cat–in–heat meow. To blank it out, to parge the hull of her brain—the incessant bilge of voices. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know. “MEOOW, RROEWW. MEEEOOW-RRRR.”
Kevin, the kid in the 7-Eleven, watched her leave the store, making these cat sounds, like a little kid: “Meoowww, meeoooww . . .” She swung her bag back over her shoulder, sending all her hair back with it. Big sweater, peasant skirt, sandals that looked like scraps of brown paper. Her knapsack was stuffed with so much junk he wondered if she actually had a place to live.
She never bought anything usually, except lottery tickets—those scratch-and-win ones. The funny thing was, she’d take a while picking out what she wanted but then she’d just stick them in her bag and leave. Most people couldn’t wait to see if they’d won something.
And she always had money: twenties, lots of fives. He wondered if she was a hooker; but shit, who would actually pay for some of that? When she’d dug out the two five-dollar bills he’d noticed her hands again—tiny claw fingers poking out of her sleeves. Little kid fingers—dirty, nails bitten down—how did she get her teeth around what was left? His girlfriend’s nails were something she took pride in; Cindy’s hands were like what you see on models. She came up to him in the hall at school sometimes, and just touched his arm for a second, with hands you see on commercials, every finger like a brand-new Corvette—different colors, metallic blue, purple, pink. Like something you would save up your money to buy.
She smelled good, though, the one that had just left the store—the cat lady. She looked dirty but she always smelled like soap, one of those health-food store soaps, the smell of the health-food store soap section. Cindy smelled good too, but more like fresh towels, shampoo—that kind of thing, but this crazy cat woman . . . she’d looked at him once, straight at him, not blinking, staring him down almost, the way his mother did sometimes, her eyelids droopy, and with her hair out of her face she looked not half bad. With a bit of work he could see himself, you know, actually getting interested in her.
Kevin looked down at the counter: the wrapper was still there, bits of smeared chocolate and wrinkled paper, paid for but still in the store. For a second the feet of his mind scuffed at something about the idea of goods turning into garbage even before you actually bought them; but he stepped around the next bit, an insight that would bring it all down—his new Red Wing hiking boots; the picture of a jade-green Corvette he kept in his wallet. It was a struggle for him, the insight it would lead to; so he thought about Cindy again, her hands: the things they promised him, with that cream she used sometimes, what they told him about what he was finally going to get for his birthday next week.
4
Slain in the spirit . . .
Joyce Hayward wondered how she would explain it to her son if he ever found out. Here she was telling this man she’d just met things about Simon that her best friends could only guess at.
“Elijah Thornquist,” it said on his card. “Calliope Associates.” And she had taken it at face value: as credentials. A business card. A thing you could mock up on a vending machine at the airport—five dollars for fifty. Her daughter, Beth, had told her all about it. She’d bought some as a joke for her new husband—a card with “Beer Taster” or something like that on it. She realized she’d never seen her own name on a business card.
“I can’t believe our Simon had anything to do with it.” Joyce Hayward paused and turned away from him. She let her gaze rest benignly on the small children squealing and splashing in the pool beyond the plate glass of the members’ lounge window. “He was a complicated child, but all children are at that age—aren’t they? I was complicated. My husband, George, was complicated. Beth was not so complicated but she’s like that—his sister, Beth? Sensible. ‘Together’ is the word for it. She’s got her act together.”
“You say this happened when he was about eight.”
“This one time, yes. The church-service thing. Eight or nine, I guess. Around there. We’d moved to Wheaton, oh, a year or so earlier than that. George had just got his new job with Pitney Bowes, and we had to up and move right in the middle of the school term. Simon didn’t like it, I remember, leaving all his friends, having to start all over. His sister, she was younger so it didn’t matter so much to her.” Joyce smiled and took another sip of coffee, resting on the memory of her daughter’s imperturbability.
“It was Episcopalian, I remember. The church. All that chanting back and forth, but George liked it—his mother had been a
n Episcopalian—a good way to get to know people in the community. He wanted to lay down roots, he said. Simon hated it right from the start. So did I, to be honest.”
“In the newspaper accounts, they never mentioned Simon having anything to do with it.” Mr. Thornquist raised his head as if he were setting his sites on her along the bridge of his nose.
“Well, no one knew, you see. No one but me and Beth, I suppose. He never kept anything from his little sister. He told us he was going to do it. In a snit about something or other, having to put on his shirt and tie—get a haircut before Sunday. Something.” She looked out beyond the glass to the pool—kids admonishing each other, practicing adult things: taking sides, holding grudges. “Reverend—Wentworth? Was that his name?”
The man across from her nodded. “Did you get the feeling he meant any harm by it?”
Joyce had a vivid memory of poor Mr. Wentworth finally coming to rest in a fetal position on the floor beside the pulpit: one of his shoes had come off; she remembered noticing a hole in the heel of his sock. “It was too much of a coincidence, but I can’t believe Simon really had anything to do with it; he wasn’t a malicious kid. He’d never want to hurt anybody. ‘What are Pentecostals?’ I remember him asking me that about a week before it happened. He’d seen something on TV, he said. About speaking in tongues.”
She shifted in her chair and leaned over to massage her Achilles tendon. “He had this knack, you see—George used to say, ‘The kid’s possessed,’ but it wasn’t like that; Simon always knew what he was doing. It was always him doing it—do you know what I mean? One time when he was about four or five he caught a chill and his temperature shot up; we had to put him in a tub of ice water, to bring his temperature down. The doctor was afraid he’d go into convulsions. We were up all night with him till the fever broke. ‘Billy’s dog Soldier’s going to bark.’ That’s what he said when he opened his eyes. ‘Billy’s dog Soldier’s going to bark.’ I’ll never forget it. A minute later a dog started barking down the street somewhere. We didn’t know who Billy was, some boy Simon knew—we’d never met him. There was this barking, though. Right after he said that.”