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The Afterlives

Page 6

by Thomas Pierce


  “We live in such amazing times, don’t we?” Wes asked. “In my prayers at night I thank God for putting me on Earth when he did. I say, Dear God, thank you for putting me here, now, and not back when we were trying to kill each other with swords. What if I’d been born on some farm in the Dark Ages? What did people have to look forward to back then? A new plow? A trip into town every three to four years? Marriage to a cousin? Those poor idiots died from exhaustion. They were bludgeoned to death. They were trampled under cart wheels.”

  “My great-great-uncle was killed by a mule kick to the head,” I offered.

  Wes nodded eagerly. “Mule kicks. Lightning bolts. Pneumonia after a cold rain.”

  “People still die that way,” Sudeepa said, setting her drink on our table for a moment so that she could shift the child to her other arm. “You do know that, right?”

  “Nine times out of ten modern medicine can save you today. It’s a question of access. The number of drugs in development, in labs across the country, the world, it’s incredible. If not for the FDA, we’d have twenty new cancer treatments available by breakfast tomorrow. People don’t die anymore, they just fail to find the right cure. We’re more fortunate than anyone who’s come before us. Because we’re so close to having all the answers. We’re at the cusp of a new era. Our entire evolution has led us to this point.”

  “It led us to every point before this one, too,” Sudeepa said, rightly. “Plus all the others that haven’t come yet.”

  “Just around the corner is immortality. Every one of us, if we hang on long enough, will live forever.”

  “But what about terrorism?” Sudeepa asked. “School shootings? The droughts? The water wars? Genocides? You can’t tell me, not with a straight face, that this is the best time to be alive in all of human history. Wes, what about the Weeza virus!”

  “Which one is that?” I asked.

  “Weeza’s from tick bites,” she said. “Melts your insides. A death sentence!”

  “Which ticks are these?” I asked. “The little brown ones or the little black ones or the bigger black ones with the white spots?”

  “The little black ones with the double-white spots, though you need a magnifying lens to distinguish two white spots from one,” she said. “No bigger than a pinhead, these little ticks, but killers. Ten years ago there was no such thing as a Weeza virus. They say it started with the squirrels, but how did the squirrels come to have it and why wasn’t it transmitted to us before now?”

  “Weeza was always there,” Wes said dismissively, “we just didn’t realize it. Everything you fear—the viruses, the violence—we’ve always been living with it, in some form. What’s changed is that today we’re just more aware. It only seems like there’s more to fear because we’ve been so successful at identifying all the various threats.”

  “Do you really think we’ll really be immortal one day?” I asked. “You think we could live forever?”

  “Absolutely. Our parents were the last generation that will know death. Anyone under forty, if they take care and avoid cholesterol and saturated fats, if they stay fit, if they keep off the roads as much as possible, they’ll make it.”

  “I hope he hasn’t turned you off our church,” Sudeepa said to me with a smile. “We’re not all a bunch of crazies, I promise you.”

  Outside my door I could hear the Fortune Tellers were debating whether yogurt was the product of bacteria or if it was the bacteria itself. All this because Susan had spilled her Yoplait. Their morning news show banter was without end, a nonstop source of all the world’s dumbest news and cheap headline fodder.

  I had an email back from the archivist. Other than what I’d already found, she’d managed to locate only a short funeral notice for Clara Lennox, which had appeared in the state newspaper. The notice said simply: THE FUNERAL OF MRS. CLARA LENNOX will take place at the South Methodist Church in Shula on Saturday 4th. That was it. I read the sentence again—and then a third time.

  I played TheProof.mp3 on my computer. This time I had more trouble locating the woman’s voice in the noise. It seemed possible that the recording could change from one playback to the next. Then, I heard it, a single syllable, a far-off utterance. She was still in there.

  If ghosts truly existed, then surely we were surrounded on all sides? By my calculations the earth contained roughly 197 million square miles of surface area (land and water), and according to various population studies, 108 billion humans had lived and died on the planet. That meant that for every square mile, there had been roughly 548 deaths in our not terribly long history as a species. Even if we assumed only twenty percent of those who’d died remained as a ghost, that still would have left more than a hundred ghosts per square mile, not to mention the fact that we don’t live all over the world but in pockets, here and there. We don’t generally live in Antarctica or the Gobi Desert or on the ocean, and accounting for this fact would only maximize the figure, would only increase the number of ghosts per square mile.

  Anyway, I approved Su Casa Siempre’s loan.

  Not all White Hairs, of course, had white hair. They came in many forms and shapes, in various states of being and decay. White Hair wasn’t a hair color; it was Medicare and Social Security checks; it was a box you checked on government forms. My parents, who still lived in Shula and who were not quite sixty, didn’t yet qualify. I’d been seeing more of them, especially my father, since my surgery. He came around the house about once a week, typically unannounced, to see how I was doing.

  One evening I came home and his car was parked in the driveway. Inside I found him in the kitchen grinding coffee beans.

  “You’re out of filters,” he said. “I’m using a paper towel.”

  Growing up, I’d often heard my father referred to as a handsome man, though I feel incapable of making such a determination myself. Large and muscled, he lifted free weights every morning in my old bedroom, which he’d converted into a gym and home office, though at this point in his life he was mostly bald with a thick white goatee on his face. He was the sort of person who thought it foolish to invest in anything other than commodities—silver, gold, the elements. He would drive two hours north just to look at the first snow of the winter, to make a single snowball by the side of the highway, and then turn right back for home. He could lift a propane tank and tell you exactly how many medium-high grilling hours it had left to burn.

  I sat down at the breakfast table. He started the coffeemaker and joined me.

  “So,” he said. “How’s the ticker?”

  “Still ticking.”

  “I’m on blood thinners now. Did your mother tell you? Dr. Tamsin started me on them. You remember Little Ronny Tamsin? You were in my class together.”

  I remembered Little Ronny Tamsin with his buckteeth and his giant blue Gatorades. We’d been seatmates at the same circle of desks that year in my father’s trigonometry class.

  He looked around my kitchen and then sighed. I sighed back at him. One day, I suspected, all of our conversations would be like this, a nonstop sigh fest. Everything that needed to be communicated would be through a Morse code of sighing.

  I knew that he did not approve of this house, its general shabbiness. I had a maid come every other week, but no amount of cleaning ever seemed to help. The house was small, a shoe box at the county’s edge, a fixer-upper surrounded by scrappy woods, on the other side of which two pit bulls yapped incessantly, day and night. My original plan had been to spend only two years here, renovating it myself before flipping it, but seven years later here I was, living among the ruins and mouse droppings, all my projects half completed. Above us, where I’d exposed the beams in the kitchen ceiling, chunks of drywall still clung to the screw heads.

  “So,” he said. “I’m just back from a conference.”

  “The thing in Miami?”

  He nodded excitedly. “It was very interesting. You sho
uld have come with me.”

  Now that he was retired, my father finally had the time to fully immerse himself in all the things that really interested him: unexplained disappearances, unsolved murders, government conspiracies. He told me then about a particular panel at the UFO conference that had addressed the theory that the moon was actually hollow and that it might in fact be a spaceship dragged into our orbit by extraterrestrials at some point in our ancient history. As he laid out the finer points of this theory, a theory that he found “doubtful but plausible,” the coffeemaker gurgled and spat.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  “Titanium. You were saying that the moon’s surface is made of titanium, like a spaceship would be.”

  “More than just titanium. Other elements, too, but yes.”

  The coffeemaker beeped. He poured us both cups, and we went into the living room together. My father stretched out on the sofa, kicked off his leather shoes, and gazed around at my furnishings. The room, I’ll admit, was sparsely appointed: the couch, the television, a low metal table designed to look like an artifact pillaged from a fallen empire.

  My father, I’m guessing, was worried by what probably appeared to him as evidence of a monastic lifestyle. Every time he came over he seemed surprised at how little progress I’d made in making a home of the place. To him minimalism wasn’t a design aesthetic but an unfortunate condition that indicated an economic or spiritual malaise. He was a collector and a keeper, a stacker of boxes: of antique woodworking tools, old half-filled notebooks, RC Cola bottles, old power-line glass insulators, newspapers, the arm sling he wore in the tenth grade after fracturing his wrist.

  This, the injury to his wrist, was the “greatest tragedy of his life,” as it had allegedly scuttled any hope he had of achieving much in the years to come. He’d been a pitcher for his high school baseball team, and, though I’ve always found his logic both reductive and pointless, he maintained that if not for breaking his wrist, his fastball, which was “notorious all over the state,” would have earned him a college scholarship to somewhere other than the tiny Podunk Baptist school he wound up at in rural Georgia. If not for that injury, he insisted, he would have been a doctor and not a retired math teacher with a shitty retirement package. He’d have had a summer house at the beach and been driving a Beamer. He would, in other words, have out-succeeded my uncle the banker. All this denied my father because of a dumb wrist fracture.

  However, if not for that injury, I was sometimes tempted to counter, there would have been no me. After all, it was at the Podunk Baptist school that he’d met my mother. She hadn’t grown up in Shula but in a small town in South Georgia. Her father, who died the year after I was born, had taught economics at the school, and so my mother had attended tuition-free. She claimed it never once occurred to her to go anywhere else.

  They’d met at a dance. When my father arrived, he saw my mother across the room standing by the punch bowl with a flower in her hair. Love at first sight.

  For years and years, the night was described to me in exactly those terms, as more of a postcard than an actual event, a bad Norman Rockwell painting maybe, though of course the truth was more complex. In retellings of the story, new, more puzzling and even contradictory details would often emerge. Such as that Mom was in fact engaged to another boy at the time. Such as that Dad had arrived at the dance with someone else, too. About these other people, I know nothing. They have their own stories, surely.

  “Your mother prays for you every night,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said. “I’m doing just fine.”

  “If she wants to pray, let her pray.”

  “That’s not what you used to say. You used to tell her it was pointless.”

  “Did I? If that’s true, I regret it.”

  “So you believe it does work, then?”

  “I believe I shouldn’t believe one way or the other.”

  I told him about something I’d read recently, about an interesting study that had looked at the brains of people while they were praying and meditating, specifically, Tibetan monks. What the researchers noticed was that the parietal lobes, which are responsible for sucking in the information of our everyday life and making sense of the onslaught, were curiously inactive during prayer. When people were praying, in other words, when they experienced that wonderful feeling of oneness with the universe, the brain was no longer working quite so hard to construct a meaningful series of events from the slop of our nonstop experience. It was no longer constructing reality, you might even say. My father listened to this with a sanguine expression on his face, one socked foot scratching the other at the end of the couch. Was this what was wrong with me? Had the cardiac arrest damaged my parietal lobes? I didn’t ask my father this, but it occurred to me then that my brain was failing to construct the appropriate reality from the onslaught.

  “Once upon a time you were going to be a preacher,” he said with a smile.

  He was referring to an essay I’d written in the fifth grade for a contest, and so I didn’t feel any need to comment.

  “I get it,” he said. “You and me, we’re the same. Hyper-curious skeptics. An infuriating combination. I wish I could say you’ll find your way, but I’m not so sure. Look at me. I’ve figured out nothing. I’m constitutionally incapable of faith. I’ve always envied people who just believe in something, no questions asked. I look at your mother and I think she’s got it all figured out. Secret of the universe. It comes easy to her. Me, I wake up in cold sweats at night. I toss and turn. I don’t want to die, but then again, I don’t want to live forever, either. There’s no winning, is there?”

  “I tried out a new church. You’d probably like it. The Church of Search. There’s no preacher, no core set of beliefs. It’s more like a lecture series than anything else.”

  “Can you write that down for me? Where’s this happen?”

  I scribbled all the information onto a piece of paper and handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” he said, slipping it into his already swollen wallet. “Perfect.”

  We sat quietly for a few minutes.

  “Tell me,” he said, “are you seeing anybody, Jim? Your mother and I worry you might let this heart situation keep you from getting out there and meeting people. You can’t be afraid to live.”

  “It’s only been a few months. Besides, I’m out there. I was on a date recently, in fact.”

  His eyes lit up. “I’m very glad to hear it! What’s her name?”

  I didn’t want to tell him the woman I’d been out with was in fact my eleventh-grade girlfriend, not to mention the fact that I wasn’t really sure where things stood between us. Annie and I had only traded a few texts since she’d missed our church date. Currently she was down in Charleston with her dad, picking up the remainder of her stuff from storage.

  “It’s nothing serious,” I said. “Nobody worth mentioning yet.”

  “I can’t even remember what it’s like to go on a first date. It’s been so long since I did it. To be honest, I only ever really dated one other woman before your mother. Her name was Franny Kidd. Her father was my pediatrician. She was sixteen, and I was twenty, which means by today’s standards I could have gone to jail, I guess.”

  “Only if you slept with her.”

  He blushed. “Well, she was such a sweet girl. She died years ago in an industrial trash compactor. Totally crushed to death. Terrible, isn’t it? A freak accident. I couldn’t even fantasize about her anymore after I read about that. When I think of her, I can only picture her with a crushed head.”

  I grimaced because, somehow, we had veered into a discussion of my father’s failed sexual fantasies.

  “I was a late bloomer,” he said. “Very serious, very introverted. I didn’t know how to talk to girls. I gawked too much. Said the wrong things. Somehow I managed with your mom, which was
a miracle given what a knockout she was. Don’t look at me like that, it’s true, she really was. Still is, for that matter. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen in my life. I was afraid to bring her home. I thought my brother would steal her away. He could charm just about anyone. He was never without a girlfriend. Charm goes a long way, I’ve realized over the years. When it comes to success, charm often counts for more than intelligence, believe it or not.”

  He said this as if it were a gross injustice, and I gathered he was not so subtly insulting my uncle’s intelligence, perhaps even prompting me to take a side, which I wouldn’t do. This wasn’t a conversation I was interested in having, not to mention the fact that my job as a loan officer, arguably, was one that required much more charm than intelligence. Sensing he wanted to keep talking about my uncle, I brought out my phone to derail him.

  “I have something that might interest you,” I said. “A recording.”

  I didn’t mention ghosts or hauntings. My only instructions to him were to listen carefully to the recording and tell me what, if anything, he could hear. I plugged in some headphones, put them in his ears, and then pressed Play.

  “The dog’s on fire,” he said loudly, without any hesitation. Then, “Whose dog is on fire?”

  I pulled the headphones from his ears. “You understood that?”

  “Yes, what was it?”

  I told my father everything—about the extermination anomaly, about my trip to the restaurant (leaving out Annie), about the stairwell, about the physicist who’d made the recording, about what I’d learned at the library—and as I did, a childish grin snuck onto his face. He sat up on the couch and suggested we eat dinner there. Tonight. Right now.

  My intention in playing him the recording had been only to change the subject, to give us something to discuss other than ourselves, and I wasn’t certain I wanted to take him to the restaurant. But when he stood up to go, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to convince him otherwise. My father had long enjoyed a reputation at the middle school as something of a hallway brute, a teacher not to be trifled with, but in truth he was a supremely sensitive man, who when criticized would often fall into long, brooding silences. My mother and I had always been careful of these moods.

 

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