Afterlife

by Paul Monette

“Where are you moving exactly?”

  “Nowhere,” retorted Sonny with an easy laugh. A trifle thick on the astral plane, and he seemed to make an effort to bring it back to earth. “I figure I’ll head up to Vegas, then maybe Wyoming. Doesn’t really matter. The thing is to get off the path.”

  “Right,” said Steven, impeccably neutral. “So, four o’clock in the North Garden. You know where that is?”

  “’Course. Ellsworth’s just around the corner.”

  He promised to give the message to Dell. As Sonny hung up, he grinned at Steven’s discomfort. He’d always gathered strength from the leeriness of unbelievers. It only made the link more clear between him and the rest of his rare breed, their souls wide open like windows on time. He was still almost dizzy with truth as he floated out the door to the back terrace. His bare feet left beautiful vanishing prints on the cold slate paving stones. He fell to his knees like a praying man.

  And the dog rolled over on his back, his tail batting lazily between the roots of the sycamore. Sonny Cevathas, prince of Thebes, gripped the beast around the neck and wrestled into its arms. They growled with love, sparring and playing it tough as they sprawled on the brink of wildness. “Yeah, you’re just a big baby, aren’t you?” declared Sonny, pushing his wrist between the dog’s bare teeth as if daring it to draw blood. The animal’s white fangs clenched lightly, not breaking the skin. They both knew just how far to go.

  His second session with the channeler had been much more metaphysical. Salou wore a purple caftan and two gold cobra bracelets. Again they sat by the pool, but this time on a wrestling mat in the shade of a pergola. They drank a cup of yellow tea, and then Salou went into a trance, abrupt as a station change. The XVIIth Dynasty, where he’d served as Pharaoh’s chief healer, was as palpable as his own backyard. He gabbled a while in a disconnected monologue, jeweled scarabs and scented oils and even a mummy’s curse. Then he began to talk to Sonny direct, cousin of Pharaoh, as if they were on a terrace of the palace, slaves fanning them with bullrushes. Cross-legged, head bowed, Sonny went with the flow, never quite leaving his body but utterly free of it now. They chatted back and forth, ancient to ancient, building pyramids.

  After twenty minutes down the Nile without a commercial break, Salou pitched over onto the mat, lying in the pool of his purple gown. His breathing stuttered and his tan went pale, but the Greek wasn’t worried. Death was the furthest thing. Sonny looked up through the green roof of leaves that covered the pergola. For a moment he thought he saw a cobra twisting among the vines, and even that was no bad omen. The world was nothing but change, liquid as a chameleon. When he cast his eyes once more to the prostrate figure, Salou was smiling peacefully.

  “Where should I go?” asked Sonny.

  “Everywhere,” replied the shaman. “Just keep moving.” Sonny nodded gravely. “Put down no roots for three years, and then you’ll be ready.”

  “For what?” asked Sorry, sorry the instant he spoke. The channeler laughed softly. How could he know till he got there? He might as well ask where his next life would birth him. Off the path, out of the cycle—the point was to break loose from all destination. He’d done it once before, the day he walked out of his father’s house. A new life waited beyond the slam of every door.

  He could feel the dog’s heart beating, twice as fast as his own. He hated to leave the creature behind, but understood they had crossed paths for just that reason, so he would have something to miss. He had a sudden impulse to sneak the dog into his room, give it a taste of domestic bliss, one night in from the cold.

  “Would you like that, pal?” he whispered into the animal’s chewed ear. If he wasn’t gay anymore, perhaps he could reinvent being a boy from the bottom up. “Someday we’ll go hunting together,” he said, grabbing at any cliché as long as there was a dog in it. “Rabbit and deer and pheasant …”

  The beast jerked beside him, then scrambled to its feet, glowering toward the house. Sonny rolled over and saw Dell Espinoza standing just outside the dining room. He hadn’t caught sight of the two grappling figures on the ground till he stepped from the house. Now he stood awkward and uncertain, as if he’d seen too much.

  “Big surprise,” Sonny drawled. “The guy in the wheelchair died.”

  “Oh.” Dell held a small brown package in both hands, as if he meant to set it down with the greatest care.

  “Stevie called special. He wants us there at the service.” Dell made no protest as Sonny reeled off details. They would ride over together in the Mercedes. “Actually, it’s kinda perfect. Be the last time the three of us get together.”

  “Okay,” Dell replied diffidently, moving to go in the house.

  “Hey,” called Sonny, and Dell half-turned back, “you can have my room when I’m gone.”

  Finally Dell Espinoza cracked a smile. “No thanks,” he said, almost an apology. “Don’t need a room.”

  Sonny swallowed the burr of disappointment, forcing himself not to care that Dell hadn’t asked him where he was bound. In this at least he harbored no illusions. There wasn’t a man in L.A. who would truly mourn his leaving. What startled him here was the stab of longing, wishing he had a brother. He understood he wasn’t ready. It might take years, perhaps till the end of his wandering, before another man could clasp his hand as a friend. And then, cleansed of the rot of passion, his blood clear as a mountain stream, he would come to love at last.

  For now it was enough just to reclaim his innocence. Still the dog stood over him, ears perked, mute as a sphinx. Sonny came up on one elbow and nuzzled his face in the white star patch on the beast’s chest. He could feel the throb of the swollen lymph node in his armpit, but it seemed no more than a battle scar now. “Yes, yes, yes,” he whispered against the dog’s breast.

  It started to rain at six, hard, the first real storm of the winter. By the time Steven and Mark got in, it was coursing down the crooked lane, waves and sheets of water. They had left Ray Lee’s apartment bare to the floorboards. Goodwill had picked up the furniture, not including the mattress, which lay in a soggy heap by the hydrant in front of the house, leaching its viral residues and night sweats into the gutter.

  Margaret said she would drop the key off at the landlord’s on her way home. Steven told her she could spend the night with them if she didn’t want to be alone. “Unless you’re going to Richard’s,” he added hastily.

  “Richard?” She stared in disbelief. “You don’t understand, he thought he was going to get AIDS from the turkey. Richard and I are deader than Ray.”

  So she went home by herself, happy to collapse in her own bath-tub, and Steven and Mark slogged uphill in the Jeep, drenched to the skin as they ran to the house. They stripped down and lay side by side in bed, not quite touching, numbly watching the news and weather—no mention of AIDS at all, let alone the death of a nobody Korean. Steven ordered a pizza from Domino’s, pepperoni and sausage, large so there would be some left over for the boys. They were both in a sullen rage by now, not at each other but at It. Still, they were smart enough to know the ice was very thin. The slightest wrong move by either of them and the other might start railing.

  They tried to project it as best they could. When the President came on, simpering in the rose garden, they spewed a load of bile in his direction. The last item on the local news was a cutesy bit about Christmas shoppers. The malls were full to bursting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, despite the torrents of Alaska rain. Clip after clip showed kids on Santa’s lap, four-year-olds flirting deliriously with the TV cameras.

  “White folks,” Mark said darkly.

  “Mm—partying in the holocaust. But hey, if I was negative—if this hadn’t fucked my life—I’d probably be out there too.”

  An especially unappealing group of Valley girls, laden down with shopping bags, mugged for the camera. “If Victor was still here, you mean.”

  “But he’s not,” retorted Steven briskly, because some fights had to be ended before they got started.

  The
rain took care of the night. The drum of its rhythm on the roof finally sent them burrowing under the covers and groping into each other’s arms. In the room beyond the garage, the dog lay curled beside Sonny’s bed, back legs twitching, running away in a dream. Sonny, who’d always slept naked, wore a pair of baby-blue sweats tonight, as cozy as a kid’s pajamas. In the living room Dell slouched on the sofa in the dark, not bothering to drag the bedding out of the closet. He held his gun in both hands as if waiting for an intruder. Out the front window the city below looked to be underwater. Nobody would have known three widowers lived in the house. They had nothing in common anymore except the roof.

  In the morning Steven went out to have his dark suit pressed, the one he hadn’t worn since Victor. He ended up at Shaw Travel, Margaret too, completely unplanned. Heather didn’t know what to do with them, since she was busy on three different phones, but they seemed content to putter around with coffee and didn’t get in her way. After a while they began to poke at the stack of second-class mail piled up on Ray Lee’s desk, mournfully sifting through it. Ray had been in charge of brochures and schedules, able to rattle off flights and sailings with astonishing recall. The Siamese, which Heather had brought to the office, rubbed against everyone’s legs as they worked, making sure no one forgot.

  Mark went home to Skyway Lane to pack yet another overnight bag. He didn’t have any sense that he lived there anymore, didn’t feel attached to any of his things. In fact he had the creepy feeling that the house was waiting to be cleaned out, just like Ray Lee’s apartment. He hurried into the bedroom and grabbed underwear and shirts, wanting to get out fast. He and Steven had never actually talked about living together, but it was getting to be a de facto situation all the same.

  The whole matter of Steven aside, Mark still had the idea that he was in transit, a moving target. He liked that part. He wished he could put a FOR SALE sign by the front stoop on the way out. He swiveled his watch to the back of his wrist to remind himself to call a realtor. He tracked down his gray pinstripe in the hall closet and was out the door when the phone rang. Perversely he turned to answer it, as if to prove no one had died here.

  “We heard you had an earthquake,” said Rob Inman, who never said hello.

  “Well, it must’ve been pretty small, because I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Where was it?” Rob demanded off the phone, then back to Mark: “Hillsborough.”

  “That’s up by San Francisco, Dad.”

  “He’s okay,” Rob called out to Roz. “You got her worryin’ worse than me.”

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “How’s Steven?”

  This caught him completely off guard. “He’s fine too,” Mark said lamely. “Actually—” He’d never told his father anything real before. He stepped out into thin air. “We sort of got together.”

  “Well, well, well. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”

  It could have gone either way. The tone of the father, buddy/buddy and cocksure, was perilously close to the leering he used to do over Mark’s “girls.” Rob was incorrigible. “No, it wasn’t,” Mark admitted, laughing in spite of himself. When his father joined in, it happened to be the first time they’d ever found the same thing funny. For that alone they let it continue, till they seemed to be laughing at nothing at all, just for the hell of it, man to man.

  By three the rain had dwindled to a drizzle. Dressed in her black Chanel suit, a veiled hat worthy of Ray’s beloved Alexis, Margaret arrived with Steven early at the cemetery office, to sign the final paperwork and meet up with Mr. Corazon. This worthy man, terminally unctuous but otherwise bland as a serial killer, insisted on driving them up to the North Garden in his own black Cadillac. He’d clearly mixed Ray up with another client, because he kept referring to Margaret as “the sister.”

  For some reason that misnomer cheered both Margaret and Steven, somehow keeping Ray Lee secret to themselves, as they wound their way through the golf-green hills to the travertine walls of the columbarium. They parked on Eternal Way, and the agile counselor held an umbrella above Margaret’s head as the three of them headed up the pebbled path to the north wall.

  Most of it was partitioned off into units three foot square, meant for a coffin to be placed behind each marble slab, rather like a wall of airport lockers. But at one end, set off by a picket fence in front, was the area reserved for what Mr. Corazon insisted on calling “cre-mains.” Here the wall was sectioned into units six by eight inches, more like post office boxes.

  As they came through the gate in the fence, a cemetery worker stood waiting by an open slot at about waist level. Beside him on a wheelbarrow was the box of Ray Lee’s ashes, about the size of a portable tape deck. As Margaret and Steven stared at it, Mr. Corazon gave a small gasp of delight, collapsing his umbrella and pointing to the sky. The Irish mist had cleared, and the pewter clouds in the west had cracked, letting through a gilded shaft of the setting sun. Mr. Corazon flushed with pride, as if Forest Lawn had produced on cue this proof of the smile of God.

  Steven could see the Jeep approaching up the hill, parking next to the Cadillac. About a hundred yards behind came Heather’s blue Toyota. Steven went bowlegged with relief at the sight of Mark, the first time either one had ever seen the other in a suit. Mark had a bunch of roses in the crook of his arm, wrapped in green tissue. As he strode up the path, he caught Steven’s eye and tilted his head in a melancholy smile.

  Reaching the little group behind the picket fence, he bussed Margaret chastely on the cheek, then gave Steven a soft punch to the shoulder. Margaret introduced him to Mr. Corazon, the two men nodding crisply, then gestured at the box of ashes. “And you know Ray Lee, don’t you?” she asked amiably.

  Steven let loose with an involuntary bray of laughter, and Mr. Corazon looked aghast. Heather and Linda were just coming up the rise, both in raincoats, Heather holding Linda’s arm and clearly very weepy, a knot of Kleenex dabbing against her eyes. They stepped through the gate, and Heather reached out to Steven and Margaret, who dutifully moved to embrace her. This was more Mr. Corazon’s speed, but he still wasn’t over Margaret’s blasphemy. When the crew from Shaw Travel pulled out of their three-man clinch, the counselor raised his brows nearly to his hairline, then caught Margaret’s eye and tapped his watch with a fingernail.

  It was four on the button. As if on command, the group of mourners moved hastily into a ragged half-circle, facing the chink in the wall where Ray would lie forever. “Wait,” said Steven, for the gray 380 had just pulled into place behind the Toyota.

  Sonny and Dell climbed out, looking respectable enough, but neither one in Sunday clothes. As they jogged uphill to the waiting group in the fenced garden, they looked like a couple of guys going out to throw a few passes. They were both too restless and impatient, coming through the fussy gate when they wanted to leap the fence. Murmuring apologies, they split off to either end of the arc of grief, Sonny standing next to Heather and Dell beside Mark. All of them looked expectantly toward the figure of Mr. Corazon.

  But he was damned if they would put it all on him, this motley crowd. He smiled gelatinously at Margaret. “Were you planning on saying something?”

  “Uh—not really.” Hopefully Margaret looked left and right, in case somebody else was moved. But no, they all kept quiet. Margaret lifted a hand and primped her veil, then nodded to the counselor. “Why don’t you just go ahead and put him in?”

  Mr. Corazon was as shocked as if they’d sacrificed a chicken on the spot. But he was a pro, accustomed to eccentricity. He gestured sharply to his underling by the wheelbarrow, who bent in a sort of bow and hefted the box of ashes with two hands. As he turned to place it into its slot in the travertine wall, Sonny thought irrelevantly of Dell the day before, bringing the brown-paper package out of the house and then in again. Beside him, Mark thought about his mother, the urn of ashes displayed in the TV room, unburied till his father sold the house in Manhasset. Margaret thought nothing at all except that this was the ve
ry last thing she had to do, for the rest of her life.

  There was a grating noise as the workman slipped the box in. Then he reached for the bronze plate that covered the front and sealed the tiny tomb. Drawing a screwdriver from his pocket, he began to fix the cover in place. Heather, still the only one with tears, was thinking how awful it was that a full-grown man could be rendered so small, but then this was her first. Linda beside her, holding her arm, thought with a shiver how cramped and claustrophobic was the slot in the wall. Fiercely she comforted herself that Marcus Flint was scattered on the mountain, so at least his soul could breathe. Steven wasn’t thinking of Ray or even Victor. He held himself back, abstracted, almost bored, yet hungry to be out of here and back in the soup of life. He felt selfish and loved the feeling, greedy to have his time with Mark. He glared at Mr. Corazon with loathing, as if that manicured queen were Death’s doorman himself.

  The workman put in the last of the four screws on the bronze plate. The lettering on it was all in Korean, ordered months ago as part of the package. The characters probably spelled out Ray Lee’s name, but none of the mourners knew for certain. Maybe it was a Shinto scrap of wisdom. There was a proper moment of silence as the workman stooped to the barrow and wheeled it away. For a brief few seconds everyone stopped thinking and stared blankly at the finality of one life shut away.

  All but Dell Espinoza, whose eyes were fixed on his sister’s hand where it cradled Heather’s arm. He hadn’t stopped looking at that since he took his place at the end of the line. This time he was sure. He might have been jumping the gun, of course, since he had no way of knowing what had been declared, let alone consummated. But there was no mistaking the intimacy of the touch, the way the two women folded toward each other. Linda’s shyness couldn’t hide it, nor Heather’s little-girl grief. He felt it in his viscera, the last rope slipping loose, the final heave of ballast weighting him still to the ground.

  Mr. Corazon raised his brows once more to Margaret, indicating that Forest Lawn’s part was over. In response, Margaret raised the veil from her face and tucked it up over the hat brim. The seven mourners broke ranks, turning to greet one another with the ambiguous relief of survivors. Mark laid his roses at the base of the wall. No after-party of any sort was planned, no provision having been made by Ray himself, who was otherwise so punctilious. This was it. No lingering. Margaret led the way out of the garden, allowing Mr. Corazon to take her arm, and was followed by the others in pairs: Steven and Mark, Heather and Linda, Sonny and Dell. A regular procession.