The Afterlives

by Thomas Pierce

  I remember a particular weekend—I had my driver’s license, so I was at least sixteen—when we were on our way to an amusement park in Tennessee and my father, coming to a sudden traffic backup on the interstate, slammed on the brakes and swerved our Volvo wagon down off the side of the road to avoid a collision. He’d been driving very fast, too fast, and he had a tendency to make hard, painful stops. My mother, in the passenger seat, fearing the worst, had grabbed the Oh-Shit-Bar, as we called it, and screamed, “Sweet Jesus, no!” As we reentered traffic, fueled by the rush of adrenaline, she began to lash out, berating my father for the terrible driver he was, pleading with him to please let me, a teenager, take over driving for the rest of the trip. An insult to his manhood, I would imagine. Without any comment whatsoever, my father took the next exit and whipped us back onto the interstate in the opposite direction. Now we were eastbound, heading for home. “What are you doing?” my mother asked. “Just tell me, Bill, please, what are you doing?” He didn’t say a word. I didn’t either. I knew better than to get involved. Besides, the amusement park had been my mother’s idea of a fun Saturday, and I’d never been all that keen on going anyway. When we reached our house, my father disappeared into the backyard to mow the grass, and we didn’t hear from him again until the next morning, at breakfast, when he acted as if nothing had happened at all: Amusement park—what amusement park?

  —

  WE SAT AT THE BAR and ordered enchilada sliders and Fangaritas. I could barely taste the tequila. The restaurant was not as crowded this time but still busy.

  “The physicist,” he said. “Sally Zinker. That name is so familiar. I feel like I’ve read something by her or about her. The books and Web forums, it’s all a blur. I remember loose particulars, but never things like names and central points. A function of my age, I guess.”

  “Maybe she was the keynote speaker at the Paranormal Club for Bored Retirees last year?”

  “Oh, you know the PCBR?” He smiled. “Yes, yes, very funny, Jim.”

  “Why do you go to all those conferences anyway? You say there’s no God, yet you have no trouble believing in aliens. I don’t get it.”

  “It’s not that I believe in aliens. They don’t need me to believe in them in order to exist. It’s a question of probability, Jim. Given the number of stars, the number of planets, they’re out there, trust me.”

  “But what about ghosts? What’s the probability that they exist?”

  “‘Ghost’ is just a word we use to explain something we don’t understand.”

  “Go on.”

  He smiled. I rarely encouraged him to talk about such things, and I knew that he was grateful for the opportunity. Bringing his hands onto the bar, he looked forward, and, with a goofily serious expression that zapped me right back to one of his trig classes, he ran through some of the various possibilities as he saw them:

  What we called ghosts were perhaps glimmers from some other, overlapping dimension, one that we’d one day be able to observe with the proper instruments. Or, possibly, we had conjured the so-called ghosts ourselves, collectively; we were capable, in other words, of somehow externalizing our thoughts, projecting them into what he called a psychic space, and these projections could sometimes be felt or heard with our more traditional sense perceptions. An alternate but related explanation: Ghosts were fractions of personalities, little pieces that had splintered away from a consciousness as pockets of energy. Like little volcanic eruptions of the mind that left invisible lava trails.

  I began to feel like he was going out of his way to avoid the most obvious explanation of all, that ghosts were the dead, that they were disincarnate souls. When I pointed this out to him, he admitted it was possible, sure.

  “I just have a hard time believing in the everlasting soul, that’s my problem,” he said. “I guess that’s what it boils down to.” He laughed. “I was reading recently about a couple who created a pact with each other. Whoever died first, that person would try to relay a message from the other side. As a kind of proof.”

  “What sort of message?”

  “A signal. A word or a phrase or an image.”

  “Would that be enough to convince you?”

  He shrugged. We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, “It’s funny but ever since I died, I’ve—”

  He grabbed my arm. “You didn’t really die, Jim.”

  “I did. I was clinically dead.”

  “That’s just a phrase doctors use.”

  “Correct,” I said, not really seeing his point.

  “What I mean is, if you’d died, really died, then you’d be dead, permanently, you’d be in the ground right now.” He ripped a corner off his napkin. “So you can’t sit there and tell me you died. I reject the premise of what you’re saying.”

  I’d intended to tell him that ever since I’d died I’d been obsessively reading the stories of those who claimed to have made contact with someone on the other side—in dreams, through visitations—but his interruption had dropped me into an instant foul mood. Perhaps sensing this, my father turned his attention to the television over the liquor shelf.

  The bartender wandered over, and I asked if the owner was around tonight. A pained expression edged its way across the guy’s knife-sharp face. Ruth Glazer, he reported, was currently in the hospital. She’d been coming down the stairs earlier that afternoon, fallen, and very likely broken her ankle.

  “The Dog on Fire,” I said.

  “You know about the Dog?” he asked, serious-faced.

  “Do you believe in it?” my father asked him.

  “As a courtesy to all injured parties, I feel that I must say yes.”

  “So you’ve never experienced it firsthand, then?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “But you know about the recording?” I asked.

  “We’re all aware of the recording,” the bartender said mysteriously, and then hunched forward, shoulders almost meeting his pockmarked cheeks, eyebrows scrunched in thought. “Here’s the thing. Personally, I don’t think we should mess around with the supernatural stuff. My sister had this good friend growing up, and when they were both in high school the girl got cancer and died. It was terrible. My sister never really got over it. They were super close, and, to be honest, they were both kind of weird girls. They didn’t have any other friends besides each other, and after her friend died, my sister went full Goth, white makeup, black dyed hair, the whole deal. Anyway, a few years ago, my sister starts seeing this psychic, right? And the psychic claims that her dead best friend, cancer girl, is in the room with them and not only that but she wants my sister to know that there’s some kind of malevolent spirit that’s attached itself to her. To my sister, I mean. This evil spirit, supposedly, is responsible for everything bad that’s happened to my sister over the last decade: the car accident, the drugs, the thing with the baby.”

  “The thing with the baby?” my father asked.

  “She lost a baby, but that’s a whole other story. Point is, my sister believed every word of what this psychic was feeding her, because she missed her best friend so much, and before you know it she was visiting this lady two and three times a week to try and rid herself of this evil spirit that supposedly had its demon hooks in her. The psychic was a total swindler, obviously. By the time we caught wind of it—my mom and me—my sister was out almost fifteen grand.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the bartender said. “It really is. I mean, my sister’s doing all right now. She moved back home, and she’s got these two cats. She loves the cats, and she’s happy.”

  “Maybe the evil spirit cleanse really worked, then,” my father said.

  “We’re going to rip out the stairs,” the bartender said, ignoring him. “When the renovations happen the plan is to just get rid of the stairs and rebuild them from scratch.”

  I doubted
this was going to solve the problem. Whatever was happening on the stairs, I didn’t think it could be obliterated with any new construction projects. It didn’t live in the wood and the nails, is what I mean.

  We finished our drinks, and I led my father down the back hallway toward the bathrooms. We stopped just below the staircase and stared up through its central spiral, the helix of wood spindles. Now that I knew the history of the building, knew that actual people had lived and died here, I was a little less eager to climb up and stand with my back against the wall. I wanted to know if the ghost existed, certainly, but if she did, I didn’t want to risk upsetting her.

  My father lingered at the bottom for only a few moments before grabbing the handrail and ascending with heavy plods.

  “Like this?” he asked, once he was halfway up with his back against the wall, the rail at his butt.

  I nodded and joined him there. I imagined her—Clara Lennox—passing right through me, my rib cage, my lungs, my heart. My HeartNet could withstand many stresses, but I doubted it had been lab-tested against any spectral energies. Naturally, I didn’t want my father to see how suddenly fearful I’d become, and so I took my place beside him without a word, my palms pressed firmly against the cool plaster.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “I think we just wait and hope for the best. Or the worst, maybe.”

  We’d been waiting there, silently, for only a few minutes when my father grunted, audibly, and popped off the wall. “Did you—?” He stood there and grabbed his left forearm with his right, and for a moment I thought he might be having a heart attack. His expression was difficult to translate. He seemed confused but also concerned—as if he’d just remembered he’d forgotten to turn off the stove before leaving the house.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  My father, I realized, had tears in his eyes. Had I ever seen him cry before now? I tried to remember a time. At his mother’s funeral, he hadn’t cried. He hadn’t cried when his favorite cat got an infection after a fight with another cat and died under his bed. I’d never seen him cry during a movie or from an injury. But here he was, crying on this stairwell. I wasn’t embarrassed, but I wasn’t proud either. I looked away and pretended not to notice.

  Without a word, he began moving down the steps and then walked back down the hallway. I followed. He didn’t stop at the bar but continued to the front of the restaurant, scooting past the hostess and moving outside onto the veranda. I was right behind him through the door. When I asked him what was wrong, he shrugged and turned away from me. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  We were standing by a window, on the other side of which a family of six was eating dinner together at two tables that had been dragged together. I tried to touch my father’s shoulder, but he moved away from me.

  “Just give me a minute, please,” he said.

  I jammed my hands in my pockets and stepped back. I stood there quietly, just a few feet away, waiting for him to recover from whatever it was that had just occurred. The evening air was warm, and the frogs and cicadas were screeching from a bank of forlorn trees across the road.

  “Sorry,” he said finally. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded and breathed deeply in and out a few times. I noticed that he was massaging his left forearm. The skin there was red and inflamed, as if he’d been scalded by hot water. I reached for his arm, to inspect it better, but he twisted slightly at the hip, swinging the arm behind his torso. I asked him again what was wrong, and he said it was nothing.

  “Your arm,” I said. “It’s red as hell. Let me see it.”

  He grimaced. “I squeezed it too hard, it’s nothing.”

  “What happened? Was it the ghost?”

  He asked if we could please talk about it in the car, but I ignored him and demanded an explanation.

  He shrugged wildly. “I’m not even sure where to begin.”

  “Try.”

  He stepped toward me and put his hands on my shoulders. Staring directly into my face, he pulled me into an awkward half-hug, one I instinctively resisted. We Byrd men weren’t known for being very affectionate with each other. I couldn’t remember the last time my father had tried to hug me like this. When he let me go, my eyes fell to my feet.

  “You really didn’t see any of it?” he asked. “Honestly?”

  “See what?”

  He glanced at the window. The family eating dinner there was watching us, and though I pretended not to notice, my father stared right back at them until they looked elsewhere—back at their plates, at each other.

  “Come on,” my father said, and stepped down off the veranda.

  I followed him. He was walking so fast that I would have needed to run to catch up with him. He hustled across the road and stopped only once he’d reached my Sentra in the lot. He stood by the passenger door with his hands resting on top of the car until I clicked the key fob. He was in the seat before I’d even reached my door.

  We drove a few miles without talking. On the radio a man with a deep, sonorous voice was interviewing a woman about the recent extinction of a particular species of monkey. Researchers had preserved its DNA in the event we ever wanted to reintroduce the animal to the earth. My father stared out the window, seemingly disinterested, his left arm across his legs, meaning the red mark was fully visible to me now. I snuck small glances at it as I drove. This wasn’t an abstract splotch of red; it had a discernible shape; it was a handprint! A messy one, certainly, but a handprint all the same.

  “It was so odd,” he said. “I was standing there, my eyes, and I felt something grab hold of me. There was a little pop. Like a champagne cork. A change in pressure. I could hardly breathe. I was still on the stairs, but the stairs were different now. They kept going, in both directions, up and down, forever. Infinitely! I had the strangest sense that I’d always been on those stairs. Some part of me had. Since the beginning of time, maybe. I couldn’t decide if this was bad or good. It just was.”

  His voice trailed away, lost under the sea of radio chatter. He’d interrupted the silence so abruptly that I hadn’t wanted to distract him by reaching for the radio dial, which I did now.

  “So,” I said, “you didn’t see a ghost, then?”

  He turned to me. “I didn’t see a ghost, no.”

  “But you felt it. I mean, your arm. What’s going on with your arm?”

  His eyes fell to his arm. He stared at it as if it didn’t belong to him, as if it had just fallen through the sunroof and into his lap. He clearly had no explanation to offer me.

  “And where was I during all this?” I asked.

  “You were right there. Beside me. You were there the whole time.”

  “But I didn’t see anything. How long did this last?”

  “Two seconds? Two minutes? I honestly have no idea.”

  A ghost on the stairs had reached out for my father, had grabbed his arm, had pulled him into—what? Another dimension. A ghost world. Perhaps I’d blinked at the worst possible moment and missed it. I hadn’t been paying attention. I got out my phone and held it over my father’s arm for a quick photo but he whipped it away as he realized what I was doing.

  When we reached my house, I thought maybe we’d continue our discussion over a glass of wine, but my father said he was heading home. From the front stoop I watched him turn his car around. He waved before pulling onto the gravel road at the end of my driveway. His headlights flickered on the other side of the trees.

  The next time I saw Annie I was downtown for a haircut. The streets were packed with people, and for a moment I wondered if I’d forgotten about a festival. But no—a White Hair, jaywalking, had been mowed down by a utility truck and was dead on the road. This was a shopping district, a place to stroll and buy Himalayan salt lamps and watercolor paintings of mountain ra
nges, a place where nothing unpleasant or obscene was ever supposed to happen. By the time I arrived, the police had already thrown a sheet over the poor woman.

  “She couldn’t have seen it coming,” one morose White Hair said.

  “A real sweet lady. She sure didn’t deserve this,” said another. “Nobody does.”

  “Somebody should sue that kid, that driver.”

  “I was here. Were you? I saw the whole thing. He didn’t stop at all before he turned right. This is on him.”

  “Think of her children. Her grandchildren.”

  A larger woman, who it seemed had nothing at all to do with the accident or the victim, was sitting on a bench and sobbing with a giant half-eaten cookie in her hand. They were shocked, these poor White Hairs, concerned, angry. Death, for them, having already lived so long, was something that occurred in hospice beds, behind closed doors, their bodies full of tubes, not on the street, not in plain view. That one of their own had been struck down prematurely in such a violent way had them on edge. Death could still be unpredictable. It didn’t obey any rules, follow any guidelines.

  I was on my way to the barber around the corner, but the traffic jam that had formed on the sidewalk was keeping me from getting there. Nobody seemed capable of leaving the scene. The police had taped off an area up ahead, and they were working to disperse the crowd. Their eagerness to move people along only further aroused people’s curiosity. The woman’s blood was visible on the street. The kid who’d run over the woman was standing by a cop car murmuring his story, a far-off expression on his face. He was maybe twenty years old, and he was wearing a blue short-sleeved collared shirt with the power company’s insignia over the pocket. A few of the White Hairs were glaring at him. I heard him called “dumb kid,” “idiot,” even “motherfucker.” They resented him for the death of this woman—and, possibly, for his youth.