Doyle After Death

by John Shirley

  A second door led to a brass-­fitted shower and a brass sink. There was a bar of soap, and a jar marked “Shaving Cream,” beside a straight razor for shaving. There was no toilet.

  When I came back into the main room I was startled by the shape of a man looking back at me—­from the mirror.

  I’m not sure why the reflection startled me. My hair was tousled, and I looked a little paler than normal, but other than that, nothing out of the ordinary. I looked and felt about the same as I had the day before I died. Maybe a bit better. Same hatchet-­faced guy in his thirties, not entirely unpleasant to look at, with short black-­streaked, prematurely gray hair, some early lines in my face. Not tall and not heavy. Charcoal blazer, but no tie. And I still had my cowboy boots on. I’d always loved the old movies, the pulp novels. I needed something to stand in for an identity, after failing as a writer and not getting to be a teacher. Something. So this was what I’d come up with. It seemed fatuous now.

  I stared into the mirror. I didn’t look dead. But looking closer I had to admit—­I couldn’t see myself breathing.

  A feeling of panic swept over me: I was not . . . breathing.

  The calm that had been with me since I’d awakened on the beach suddenly evaporated, and I felt an almost infantile fury of frustrated questions—­at the vagueness I’d been greeted with.

  I felt dizzy and increasingly heavy. The room seemed very warm. I stepped over to the bed and stretched out—­it creaked with my every move—­and, still clutching the overlarge key, I sank into a doze. It wasn’t sleep, as we know it on Earth; it was more like a trance, a waking dream state, but restful, too.

  They wanted me to do this, I realized, dimly. Bertram and Ruby. They wanted me to rest—­it was part of the process.

  The panic ebbed, washed away by a comfortable, hypnagogic dream state, like when you first start to wake, still half asleep, and bits of dreams are still flitting by. Not everything I saw was pleasant. Sometimes I saw things that sent a momentary shock through the dozy warmth . . .

  I saw the door of the motel room at the south side of Las Vegas, just off the highway to Boulder. I saw the dead woman lying on the floor by the bed, with the table lamp’s wire wrapped around her neck. I saw her bloated face, her staring eyes.

  I saw myself standing on the porch, while cops milled around, giving me that look . . . as the child cried when they pulled her from the bedroom. Okay, so I hadn’t hurt the kid myself. But then again . . . if I’d stayed out of the whole thing . . .

  Then I was sitting at my dad’s bedside, in the hospital. He was in a coma. He wasn’t going to come out of it. I tried to talk to him, on the theory that ­people in a coma could hear you, sometimes, but I didn’t feel like he was hearing me. I was trying to explain myself to him.

  He never did wake up. I’d gotten to the hospital too late.

  I was suddenly standing at a grave, looking at the stone. Shades of Scrooge. It wasn’t my father’s gravestone. It was mine. A small, shabby one, too. My brother had really cheaped out . . .

  And then I sat bolt upright on the bed. The visions ebbed. The panic slipped away, like when you get your breath after a long run.

  I was in my room, in the boardinghouse. A lot of time had gone by—­hours I’d spent in what passes for sleep in the afterlife.

  And I really needed a drink.

  THIRD

  Standing behind the bar, rinsing beer glasses, Major Brummigen seemed to be trying to decide if he liked me. It didn’t seem hopeful so far. We’d introduced ourselves and hadn’t gotten much farther.

  Brummigen’s Bar looks pretty much like any dark old Irish bar you’d find in a town like Chicago or New York or San Francisco, and I was the only customer on a barstool. I sat across from the well, with its rows of bottles and the mirror, which was starting to show silver backing in a webwork around the edges.

  Bertram was sitting at a booth against the wall, playing seven-­card stud with a wide-­faced, spiky-­haired young man in a High Stakes Poker sweatshirt. The spiky-­haired kid peered at his hole cards through sunglasses, his lips moving silently.

  I put a five—­a Fiona—­on the bar. “I’ll have any decent whiskey this’ll cover,” I said to Brummigen. “If it won’t buy anything but a crack on the jaw with an empty bottle, I’ll take that.”

  He grunted, found a shot glass and silently selected a bottle. Not everyone appreciates my sense of humor.

  “We have some advantages over the living,” I told the major, watching him pour the amber liquid that passes for whiskey in the afterlife. He pushed the glass brusquely to me—­scowling, slopping the drink a little. Not very professional.

  “Don’t talk about the Earthly as ‘living,’ ” he growled. “They’re not living any more than we are. Lot of ­people, before they pass to the afterworld, are less alive than ­people here. And that’s a fact! We’re alive—­we even have a biology. Back in the Before we had a different style of body, is all. A heavier and cruder body. Just you remember that, Fogg.”

  “I’m just saying that we have some advantages over—­okay, over how it was in the Before. We don’t seem to have to use a toilet. Aging is different for us. Slow, from what I understand or, like, variable.”

  The major shrugged. Shrugging looks the same in the afterlife and Major Brummigen likely looks the same as he did in the latter part of his life—­most of the time. Sometimes when an older-­seeming man is in a good mood he looks a little younger. But on the whole, in the afterlife, you settle into a look that you had when your character really crystallized, back on Earth. And that’s how he looks, like a stocky middle-­aged man with bristly red eyebrows, small bright blue eyes. He’s usually wearing an old-­fashioned bartender’s white shirt, black bow tie, and black apron.

  Turns out Brummigen had been a “lifer” in the US Army. He died early in the Iraq war, at the rank of major, his Humvee hit by an IED when he was on his way to inspect a firebase. Funny to think of him as a “lifer” after he’s died. But then again, that was his point—­he was still a lifer. I went hesitantly on, “I don’t know all the protocol. I haven’t been”—­I almost said dead but I figured he wouldn’t like that term either—­“here long.”

  “The term you’re looking for is aftered. You haven’t been aftered long. We don’t like to to be labeled ‘dead.’ You were in what we call the Before, before you transitioned. But now—­you’re aftered.”

  “Major, aftered has an ugly sound to it. In fact it sounds like aft-­turd. We should have a contest for the best name for dead as a doornail.”

  He glowered in a way that made me feel like aftered had been his coining. “You got a better term? Something prettier?”

  “Uhhh . . . Gone Baby Gone? No, too much of a mouthful. Also we’re not gone, we’re here. Wherever here is. How about transitional? Naw, that sounds like we got a sex change in the works. Passed on? Nope, sounds like something too bruised to buy in the produce department. I’ll think of something . . . plenty of time . . . got to be something better than aftered.”

  He shook his head wearily. “A real wise guy. Haven’t had a real wise guy here in a long time. It’s been pleasant not having one.” He looked at me—­and there was a moment, just a moment, when I seemed to see myself through his eyes. Literally, through his eyes. Standing behind the bar, looking at Nick Fogg. A cynical ex-­detective with a defensive smart-­aleck veneer. Then it was gone, and I was looking at the major again. That was weird.

  He sniffed. “Just get used to it. You’re aftered, and you’re in the afterworld. We don’t go with afterlife, much, in Garden Rest, because we’re still alive, just in a different kind of body.”

  Some in the Before might be puzzled by references to time in the afterlife. But that’s another misconception, that there’s no time after death. I understand there is a stage, later on, called Living Outside Time, if you play your cards right, but most of us aftere
d spirits are in time. We can even age—­in a peculiar way.

  “Well, get on with it,” Brummigen said grumpily.

  I sipped the whiskey. It tasted like a slightly astringent wet caramel to me. Not much kick. But there’s something in it that smooths anxiety with an easygoing, comforting tipsiness. “Get on with what?” I asked.

  “When newcomers wander into the bar they like to talk about how they died.”

  “So it’s okay to say died but not dead?”

  “Yeah. You can even say dead—­but you got to use it right. Depends on who and what you’re talking about. So—­let’s get on with it . . .”

  My turn to shrug. “Okay. How I died is—­I died stupidly. I was depressed and I was self-­medicating a helluva lot and I took some valium and drank a lot of Jameson’s and they didn’t mix well and I choked on . . . well, I died from it.”

  He nodded without amusement or sympathy. “Stupid, all right.”

  “I remember as I was dying I started remembering that kids’ song, ‘Found a peanut, Found a peanut . . . it was rotten, it was rotten . . .’ ”

  “And you ate it anyway. And you died. Everybody’s always gotta have one of these cute little details about when they died.”

  Everybody? I was tempted to remind him he’d only been in the afterlife for about ten years. He talked like he’d been running this place for a century. Nine years ago it was called Flannagan’s.

  I finished my drink and said, “Now I know why this place is almost empty. You’re not exactly Charles the Cheerful Bartender. Tell me something—­if it’s so wrong to say dead, how come you sell booze”—­I pointed at it—­“called Dead Granddad?”

  He shrugged. “You gotta have some sense of humor about being aftered. And by the way, the emphasis is on the first syllable—­it’s af-­tered. Now you tell me something, Fogg. When you did the stupid substance combo, what were you so depressed about?”

  “Being a failure. Hurting someone because of . . . taking a job I shouldn’t have taken. Losing my girl. Losing my job with the Hammett Agency. Turning from a promising gumshoe into a lousy detective. Couldn’t get much work on my own.”

  “And you want a do-­over, I suppose.”

  I shook my head. He gave me another whiskey, and I sipped it before I answered. It was growing on me. A pleasant burnt-­sugar aftertaste, like roasted marshmallows. “No use wanting a do-­over now. Like trying to rebuild a house using only the ashes, Major.”

  “If you say so. Some ways, it’s all do-­over.”

  He didn’t go on to decrypt this cryptic statement, so I drank a little more whiskey and thought of something else I liked about being dead. New experiences. “This place seems to have a sense of community. So I figure I’ll see if there’s any way to make myself useful.”

  He put his hands on the bar and leaned toward me. Held my eyes with his steady, heavy lidded gaze. “Useful to whom exactly?”

  I was a little surprised at the force he put in that question. Seemed to be a big question to him. “I dunno, Major. Um—­” I frowned. What had I meant? “I guess I mean useful to . . . the good guys?”

  “You think you know who the good guys are? You see any angels here? Or devils?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed. Saw a nice-­looking lady wearing only a bathrobe. Didn’t look so angelic. Saw another lady who knocked her husband off a balcony. Definitely not angelic. Met Arthur Conan Doyle, live and in person . . . didn’t have any wings on him. Ran into a ­couple of annoying punks—­Randy and Mo. Didn’t seem so devilish.”

  “So—­who’re the good guys, then?”

  “You some kinda moral relativist, Major? Hell, I dunno—­maybe whoever at least tries to do no harm, those are the ‘good guys.’ There’s ‘better guys,’ too, seems to me. Better guys are pro active, without being assholes about it. They try to make things a little better, for someone, somewhere. That’s my take on it.”

  “Yeah?” He tilted his head, looking at me, began polishing a glass with a rag. Where did they get rags in the afterlife? “What brand of do-­gooder you think we need around here? Can’t be good by feeding ­people ’cause nobody starves here.”

  ­“People suffer here,” I pointed out. “Some of them do. I got that clear from Fiona.”

  “So, Saint Nick, you’re trying to say the good guys are the ones who ease suffering?”

  I cleared my throat, thinking it over. It seemed to me I was being tested, some way. I didn’t much like his tone and I didn’t feel like taking a test. I had an impulse to tell him to fuck off. But he seemed like a right guy, if a grouchy one, and I needed to get the lowdown on Garden Rest. So I let it go, and said, “That’s about what it comes down to. The good guys take the general suffering down a notch or two. Make somebody feel some hope. I dunno, that’s as far as I ever thought it through.”

  The Major surprised me by smiling. First time since I’d come in—­a thin little smile but a congenial one. “Maybe you’re okay.” He drummed his fingers on the bar. “Maybe you can be of use.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  He glanced over at the poker players, lowered his voice to say, “We do have some security issues here. You haven’t been in the afterworld very long. But . . . it might be timely. Getting a detective here. Spur Doyle on, for one thing. Be good for him. It’s damned quick to get you involved in it, your first day, but . . .”

  “No one’s explained that ‘days and nights’ thing to me. I mean, that’s the material world, that has planets and planetary rotation and suns and all that stuff.”

  “This is a world, with its own sun. I’ll leave it at that for now. This is the afterworld, we call it. Lots of things are the same as in life, and lots of things are different. This is the material world too—­just a different material.”

  “Can I have another shot of the uh, whatever this is?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Can you pay for it? Or are you . . . a deadbeat?”

  “Nah, I’m an aftered beat. Let me see . . .”

  “I was kidding. That’s the only time I use the word dead. It’s happy hour. That five bought you two drinks—­”

  “Give him another on me, hoss!” Bertram called. “Put it on my tab!”

  “I’ll make it a double, then.” And he poured me another drink. “Just remember, Fogg, you got to earn any more money, besides what you came with. And that’s a fact.”

  I nodded. “Okay. You said I could make myself useful in town . . . that include earning some Fi’s?”

  “Yeah. Here comes the guy you ask for a job . . .”

  I turned and saw a large man rippling by the window—­it was the sort of window glass that’s warped to look antique. He came banging in the front door. It was Doyle. “Major—­there’s been another murder.”

  The major nodded. “I’ll get my coat, Mr. Doyle, and close up.”

  I looked back and forth between them. “Murder? Here?”

  Doyle looked me up and down. “Perhaps you’d like to come along . . . Bertram says you were . . . a detective? I could use the help.”

  There were three of us—­myself, Major Brummigen, and Doyle, following the Lamplighter up a dark, steep path through a forest. Four men in all.

  Sure, we were still men, and still human. Anyway, that’s how it felt.

  The Lamplighter appeared to be an old man: a bright-­eyed, hook-­nosed old man with a short, pointy gray beard and shoulder-­length curly white hair, holding his lantern high, so our party was accompanied by a wobbly pool of light. His long purple robe never seemed to get soiled, though it sometimes trailed in the muddy water trickling down the cracks in the rocky path—­and the cuffs of my trousers did get soiled. None of us were breathing hard, climbing the stony path, since none of us were breathing. Not the way you think of breathing. It took some real effort, some burning of personal energy, to get up that hill though.

&nbs
p; As we climbed, the night came on, as it does everywhere . . . as it does except where it’s always night. (Where it’s always night, as I learned later, is a series of low rolling hills about forty miles to the northeast of here.)

  The starless, moonless night sky spread like a tsunami of India ink that never quite fell; it seemed poised above the dripping willows overhanging the path. I thought of the phrase The Great Darkness that some ­people used for death. It seems to me I’d come through a great darkness to get to the Purple Sea.

  The woods smelled pleasantly of leaf decay and living soil. The Lamplighter’s arm, lifting the guiding lantern, never faltered. The occasional foxfire glimmer, blue and red, picked out a few details in the forest, where fragments of lost spirits guttered.

  The stars? They were absent without leave. Without my leave anyway. The moon? A no-­show. We never see stars, here; we never see a moon, never at all. I miss them.

  It was wet and misty out there, the rain just having quit. But it wasn’t cold.

  “We’re almost at the crime scene, Nick,” the major rumbled beside me. He had a Chicago accent. “With luck the remains are still at Gretchen’s Overlook.”

  The major’s cadences were very American; just as much as Mr. Doyle’s were British. But was Major Brummigen still an American, considering where we were? Was I still American? Was Doyle still British? Did I give a damn?

  Dressed in a caped mac over an Edwardian hunting outfit, Mr. Doyle tromped heavily in knee-­high riding boots, intermittently muttering to himself.

  When we got to the hilltop we paused for a moment, and looked back down into the valley to take in the small settlement of Garden Rest, a gemlike crescent nestling between the hills. The lights from the little town’s cottage windows and the grid of streetlamps looked back from the thick darkness. Sourced neither in electricity or gas, the lights had a brooding glow quite distinct from what you’d see on Earth. I do not use the word brooding haphazardly—­the streetlamps seemed emanations of solemn thoughts.