Annie’s relationship with my mother, however, was more strained. In fact, ever since learning that my mother had once, about a decade earlier, protested an abortion clinic, Annie had gone out of her way to avoid unnecessary contact. When I pointed out that (a) Annie’s parents were Baptist and also opposed to abortion at any stage of fetal development and that (b) protesting clinics was the sort of thing Annie herself might have done as a teenager, she countered that (a) her parents were religious, granted, but not in such a gross, in-your-face way and that (b) she’d never once protested a clinic, for the record, and even if she had, the comparison would be invalid since my mother had been in her forties at the time and therefore old enough to know better. You could blame a middle-aged woman but not a teenager, in other words, for having extreme views on God.
Navigating the maze of religious and political thought in the South, especially in a mountain town full of locals, transplanted retirees, and a small enclave of hipsters, was a challenge for us all. The only reliable way of remaining inoffensive and on good terms with most people was to never discuss such topics at all. No politics or religion at the dinner table—or anywhere else, for that matter.
Regardless, I understood Annie’s reasons for not wanting to make nice with my mother, and I never complained, as long as they remained cordial. I might have even inadvertently encouraged the divide between them with the jokes I often told at my mother’s expense. All my anecdotes about her added up to a somewhat absurd composite. The stories we tell about people (and ourselves, for that matter) only suggest them, only offer a hazy outline. In telling Annie only that about my mother that was strangest, darkest, and funniest, I feared I might have given her if not a wrong impression then at least an incomplete one. My mother could be narrow-minded and combative, absolutely, and her religious beliefs, rooted as they were in shame and fear, sometimes veered into 700 Club levels of xenophobia, prejudice, and blind self-righteousness. But my mother, it should be noted, was also capable of profound sweetness and generosity. She’d give you her left leg if she thought it would help you run better, was how my father used to put it.
Fortunately my mother seemed to approve of my marriage to Annie, though I wasn’t sure if that was because she liked Annie personally or because she was just happy to see me settled down, and in our hometown, no less. More than anything she wanted grandkids.
“You’re young,” she’d say. “There’s still plenty of time!”
What I hadn’t told my mother—because it wasn’t any of her business—was the fact that Annie was set against having any more children. I’d known this going into the marriage; Annie hadn’t sprung this on me after the fact. She said she’d done the baby thing once and that was enough for her; it had nothing to do with me. She loved me, and she was sure any babies we produced would be lovely, beautiful specimens, but the fact of the matter was she was no longer interested in changing diapers at two a.m. and pumping milk four times a day for a year.
I understood this about her, I’d resigned myself to it in order that we might be together, though admittedly I did hope she might soften on the issue with time. Regardless, I was resolved to not let this become a wedge between us. This had been one of the agreed-upon conditions of our marriage, and I couldn’t be mad at her for something about which she’d been honest.
My mother didn’t know to resent Annie for the lack of grandkids, and I intended to keep it that way. If she had any complaints about Annie whatsoever, they were related to The Church of Search, to the fact that Annie had introduced me to it, and that I, in turn, had introduced my father.
For fifteen years my parents had been members at a Lutheran church, but when my father had stopping going, Mom had jumped back over to the Baptist church. She didn’t attend services at the big one in town—where Annie’s parents were members—but at a small country church about twenty miles up the highway, which she’d picked because it reminded her of her childhood in Georgia. The pastor at this church—a gently bigoted man with a small head of matted gray hair—had specifically spoken out against groups such as The Church of Search from his pulpit, and my mother had a habit of adopting his concerns and fears wholesale.
“Church without a pastor isn’t a church,” she told me one night. “It’s a nuthouse.”
You needed a leader, she said. A shepherd. Otherwise you were just wandering through the wilderness. This was a crazy world full of crazy ideas. You could get lost out there.
We were sitting in my living room, drinking white wine, and I could hear Annie upstairs, moving furniture around with Fisher.
“You and your dad,” my mother said, “you encourage each other. I don’t like it. You should see all these books he has. He reads nonstop. Ugh. And all these books about ghosts, Jim!”
“Dad’s fine. You don’t need to worry about him.”
“Promise me you won’t mess around with that stuff. You know how I feel about it. It’s wrong. Ghosts are not to be trifled with. The Bible is very clear on that.”
“I’m not so sure it is, explicitly, but I take your point.”
“Deuteronomy. Don’t sacrifice your children. Don’t consult with sorcerers or oracles or anyone else who casts spells or talks to ghosts.”
“Do people still read Deuteronomy? I thought we’d agreed not to pay attention to that one anymore.”
“It’s just like it was with Wanda,” she said, ignoring me.
“Ah yes, Wanda Trudeau,” I said, nodding.
“Yes, Wanda Trudeau, exactly, yes,” my mother said. “That poor girl.”
Wanda had been a friend of my mother’s in high school, and though I’d never met her, Wanda’s lifestyle (my mother’s word) had long served as a cautionary tale for any sort of excess. She’d been too wild, too strange, too promiscuous, too adventurous, too drunk, too too. Anytime I broke the rules, my mother would revive the old refrain: Well, you know what happened to Wanda Trudeau, don’t you? She wound up in a nuthouse eating pudding three meals a day!
“Wanda fell deep into the occult,” my mother said. “Ghosts and demons and Aleister Crowley. We found a dead bird once, and she smeared its guts all over the sidewalk with a stick, said she was trying to read the entrails. Jim, can you believe it?”
“Augury, I think that’s called. Romans practiced augury.”
“I don’t care about any Romans, it was wrong, and it was gross. All it took was one call to her parents, and that put a stop to that.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You called her parents?”
My mother, perhaps realizing she’d said too much, was quiet for a moment. “Well, what else was I supposed to do, Jim? Tell me that! What else?”
She was flustered and embarrassed now.
“Mom,” I said uncertainly, “maybe you’ve told me this before, but how, exactly, did Wanda Trudeau wind up in the nuthouse?”
“I don’t remember,” my mother snapped. “Drugs, I think.”
I crossed my legs and sat back in my chair. She took a long, sad sip of her wine. She rarely ever drank alcohol, and already her neck and chest were streaked red. Probably she was going to ask me to drive her home soon. She scooted to the edge of the couch and placed her wineglass on a coaster.
“Listen,” she said. “You can belittle me all you want but—”
“That’s not what I’m doing—”
“You can belittle me all you want, Jim, but I’m trying to help you. I love you, and I don’t want to see you lose your way. Ever since you”—she nudged at the corner of her eye with the knuckle of her index finger, dramatically—“ever since your heart, you haven’t been the same. You’ve been through a lot. More than most people your age. But I think there’s something you haven’t considered yet. What if everything that happened to you was a blessing in disguise? What if it was a test?”
“A test?”
A look of angry impatience flashed onto her face. She
had a way of getting upset when you failed to immediately intuit what she was trying to say. “Yes,” she said, “a test of your faith.”
“Okay.” I uncrossed my legs. “Perhaps. But I would think that a test of faith would first require me to have some.”
“Please, you’ve got faith in spades. We all do. You’ve just put yours in all the wrong things, and that sets you up for a letdown. You go to a crazy church that fills your head up with fluff and what you need is a rock to stand on. There’s only one rock that will hold you up, and it isn’t ghosts or para-whatever—and guess what? It isn’t Annie, either.” She leaned closer to me. “Don’t look at me like that, Jim, like I’m the bad guy. I’m telling you this to protect you. Hey, I remember what it’s like, at the beginning, when it’s all flowers and lingerie. You’re in love with her, and she’s in love with you, and you think nothing could ever go wrong between you. Well, let me tell you, she will disappoint you. We’re nothing but disappointments, all of us, in the end. I’m not saying your marriage won’t last. But she can’t save you. And it’s not her job to.”
“I don’t expect her to save me.”
“You do, and you don’t even realize it.”
I yawned and set aside my wineglass. I had to be up early for work, I reminded her.
“You’re mad at me.”
“Not mad, just tired,” I said, not quite honestly.
She stood up. “Fine, we can leave it there for now. I’ll need a ride home, if you don’t mind. You know what this wine does to my head.”
I drove her home, as requested. I walked her to the front door and, once she was inside, started back for my car. I was almost there when the door swung open again. My father was standing there in his socks and shorts, a crumpled magazine under his arm, his head a dark spot in the foyer lights that gushed from the house. He raised his hand to his forehead and offered a sloppy salute. I saluted back and drove home.
Unlike Annie and me, my father rarely missed a service at The Church of Search. A thinking man’s church, he called it. Long on possibilities, short on conclusions. One Sunday he called our house an hour before the service to make sure we were all planning on being there that morning. As a matter of fact, we’d intended to skip. Annie was fighting off a cold that had kept her up all night sniffling, and I had bought two small trees the day before that needed to go in the ground. We were going to take it easy, relax.
“You’re going to regret it if you’re not there for this morning’s talk, I’m serious.”
“We’re a slow-moving train, Dad.”
The truth was that I’d grown a little bored with The Church of Search, with the endless parade of speakers on topics so varied I was never quite sure how to integrate them into any sort of coherent understanding of the world. The previous Sunday we’d listened to a Hollywood producer describe a series of dreams in which an angel had instructed him to make a Jesus biopic, and while his story had been an interesting one and raised certain questions about divine revelation in modern times, it certainly hadn’t been instructive to me in any obvious sense. Something highly unusual had happened to this man, definitely, but what difference did that make to my life?
“What’s so special about this morning?” I asked.
“I wanted to keep it a surprise, but fine.” He sighed. “Zinker.”
“Zinker?”
“Sally Zinker. Ring any bells? Dr. Sally Zinker?”
The name was familiar, but I’d only been awake for about fifteen minutes at this point, and I’d yet to make the coffee. In fact, as we talked, I was standing in front of the coffee machine with the little black scoop, staring down absentmindedly into the bag of dark beans.
“Sally Zinker is the physicist who recorded the Dog on Fire,” my father said.
“Right, I remember now, yes. Sally Zinker, right.”
I hadn’t listened to the recording in a long time—not since before the wedding, in fact.
“How did you know Sally Zinker will be here today?”
“Wes gets the schedule in advance.”
“Wes Riggs?”
“We’ve been meeting up for coffee some mornings after the service. He’s a smart guy. A little nutty maybe—but smart. He’s convinced we’re living in a computer simulation. Nothing I can say will persuade him otherwise. Given how far we’ve come with computers in just the last thirty years, he says there’s only one in a million chance that we’re not in a simulation right now.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Well, if we’re in a computer, my understanding is we’ve never known anything different.”
“No, not that—the coffee dates.”
“Our discussions? I don’t know, two months maybe. Anyway, go wake up your family and meet me at the church.”
Off the phone I went upstairs to rouse Annie. She rolled over, buried her face in her pillow, and groaned. We’d agreed the night before to sleep late. She’d been putting in especially long hours that week at the theater, not to mention her cold. The floor by her side of the bed was littered with tissues, a miniature battlefield of mangled white parachutes.
“Dad just called,” I said. “The presenter this morning is the lady who recorded the ghost at the restaurant.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Really? The ghost-hunter lady?”
I nodded.
“Give me twenty minutes,” she said, and sat up drowsily, throwing the blanket off her body. She wandered into the bathroom for a shower. I could hear her blowing snot in the hot water as I gathered my clothes. I went down the hall, to Fisher’s room, and promised her ten dollars if she could be ready in thirty minutes. We’d never told her about the ghost on the stairs, and the name Zinker would mean nothing to her.
“Make it fifteen,” she said.
“Fine, deal.”
I dressed in dark slacks and a blue button-down shirt, put on the coffee, and waited downstairs with the newspaper. By the time they both came down, we were already running ten minutes late. I got us there as fast as I could—about ten minutes—and parked down the street. Together we climbed the stone steps of the old Masonic Temple, passed through its anteroom, and entered the main hall just as a song was ending. I could see my father in a folding chair about three rows from the front. He was sitting alongside Wes and Wes’s wife, Harriet. The church wasn’t very crowded. There were only twenty or so people there, and we had no trouble finding seats at the back.
Not long after we’d settled in, the church’s logo—a warbling blue sphere the size of a basketball—popped into view at the front of the room and hovered about three feet off the ground. A blue light, sparking like a firecracker, radiated outward in all directions. Below the sphere letters appeared, three-dimensional, white and Plasticine, almost doughy: The Church of Search. When that fizzled away, the logo was replaced by a small paragraph of text that tilted slightly back. The text explained that the talk we were about to watch had been recorded four years earlier and had been lightly edited. This was not so unusual. Every so often, the church would send us a rerun from its archive, which stretched back six years.
The text disappeared, and the speakers crackled for a moment. A woman materialized at the front of the room. She was dressed conservatively, in loose tan pants and a white collared shirt, and I guessed she was maybe sixty years old. She was wearing very little makeup, though her lips—two thin parallel lines—were dark red. She had coarse brown hair that swept across her forehead and concealed her ears. She stared out at us, saying nothing, for what felt like an inordinately long time. Her eyes were a chilly blue, and very probing, but her lids were a soft bramble of sleepiness. She had the intensity of a trial lawyer and the insouciance of a model.
“Good morning,” she said, her voice a little husky. “My name is Sally Zinker.”
I checked the service program on my phone.
DR. SALL
Y ZINKER—“A Partial Existence”
Professor of Physics, UNC–Chapel Hill
Author of The Reunion Machine
She began with a brief description of her background—a hardscrabble childhood in Arkansas, her education, her work as an experimental physicist at UNC—but then she pivoted, stepping to the left and crossing her arms tightly. She stared out at us with a look of nervous excitement, as if what she had to say next might change our lives.
Her arms dropped to her sides, and she stepped toward us once more, moving so close to the front row that she nearly merged with it. The people sitting there leaned back in their chairs and craned their necks to see her better.
What she wanted to do now, she said, was tell us a story.
With that, she clapped her hands.
THE TALE OF TWO HANDS CLAPPED
Two hands clapped and made a noise. Both hands rejoiced. The noise was such that the clap had seemingly proved, once and for all, the existence of either hand. Flesh had met flesh. Skin, skin. Cells, cells. The slap had even stung a bit. The two hands were very happy with the outcome of their clapping experiment. They congratulated each other with more and more rigorous clapping and even a little bit of waving and thumbs-ups.
Hurrah! the Right Hand shouted. We’re here! We really do exist!
We’re here, said the Left, though a little doubtfully, because what had they confirmed, really, when you thought about it? They had existed at the exact moment of the clap, that much seemed certain, but fifteen seconds had passed since then, and now they had reached this new moment, and so how could they be sure they hadn’t, since then, slipped into a more theoretical state of hand-ness? When Left Hand posed this question to Right Hand, Right Hand was stumped.
Left Hand suggested to his friend that the only reliable way to confirm their continued existence, from moment to moment, was to keep clapping, indefinitely, and Right Hand reluctantly agreed that this was the case, that they were going to have to clap until the end of time if they wanted any sort of real assurance.
The Afterlives Page 11