The Afterlives

by Thomas Pierce

  Sally clapped—hard.

  She was a physicist, she reminded us, and she had devoted her life to unraveling the mystery of a subatomic particle called the daisy. Daisies were so small they were nearly unobservable, not to mention they were constantly flickering in and out of existence. One moment they were here and the next—poof, gone. What this meant was that the universe never fully existed. At least, not all at once. These little particles, the daisies, they were blinking on and off, on and off, like little lights, and this was happening all the time.

  So, what did this mean?

  Well, it meant that ours was only a partial existence.

  A nonstop slide, back and forth, between being and nonbeing.

  We were here—but also not here.

  In fact, at any given moment, the universe only ninety-three percent existed.

  You only ninety-three percent existed.

  She clapped again.

  Sally had never believed in God or heaven and, as was au courant in the scientific community, she’d written off most religious conceptions of an afterlife as wishful thinking. But then something happened. Something terrible. She lost a person very close to her. The love of her life, in fact. A gentle and kind and brilliant man. The beautiful brain that had produced this beautiful person, this brain was rotting in the ground, it was decomposing. This person she loved had been destroyed, and, desperate for any sort of information that might prove otherwise, she began to read widely on the topic of death. Theologians, survivors of near-death experiences, studies on consciousness—you name it, she read it.

  More than anything she wanted to find something that might change her mind. She wanted to believe that the universe was not just a happy (or not so happy, depending) mistake, that we weren’t just little bits of life clinging to a rock in the middle of a mostly dead galaxy. She wasn’t looking for God necessarily. She was just searching for an indication that life did not end with the physical body, that consciousness might, in some form, survive the body’s death.

  Thus began her second career as a paranormal investigator.

  She smiled.

  Now, something she wanted to get straight before she proceeded: She didn’t like the term “ghosts.” Say the word “ghost” and people thought of Casper, Ichabod Crane, Patrick Swayze. She had no interest in ghosts per se—only in what she called “unusual phenomena.”

  She began by visiting supposedly haunted locations: The stretch of beach where an ethereal runner in gray sweats had been witnessed on numerous occasions sprinting up and down the sand. The apartment with the toilet lid that raised itself whenever you weren’t looking. The creepy home where numerous people had claimed to hear voices behind the wallpaper. What differentiated Sally’s investigations at these various sites from all the others that had ever been conducted was this:

  She had in her possession an instrument that had never been used to study such phenomena. The instrument was something she had designed herself in her experiments with the daisy particles. The measurements provided by this instrument were too imprecise for use in a proper, publishable experiment, but they were useful if you wanted to, for instance, compare the activity of the daisies in one area relative to another. What if, Sally wondered, she were to use this device to study the daisies at these supposedly haunted locations? What might that reveal?

  Well, at some of these sites, believe it or not, the daisies were in fact behaving abnormally. In some instances, more than forty percent of the daisies in a given field were flashing away into immateriality all at once. This was very odd. She’d never observed anything like it, in fact, in all her years of research.

  A daisy hole, she dubbed this phenomenon.

  A little puncture in materiality.

  A thinning-out.

  The universe as a pair of old pants, a bald patch on the knee.

  Now: Had the daisy hole created the so-called ghosts, or had the ghosts created the daisy hole? Well, that was a chicken-or-egg question. Unanswerable at present. Regardless, what seemed certain to Sally was that the apparitions and mysterious voices that had been observed and in some cases recorded at these various sites were in some way linked to the phenomenon of the daisy hole. What we called ghosts, quite possibly, had a subatomic explanation or relationship.

  These findings indicated to Sally a level of interplay between the material and immaterial worlds, an interplay that threatened so many of our most basic assumptions about reality. For too long, she said, science had built its case upon dumb matter alone, had trusted too implicitly in the idea that matter determined our existence and not the other way around. It was time, Sally said, to doubt everything. It was time to ask more questions.

  What if consciousness, for example, did not dwell exclusively in the squishy mud of our brains? What if what we had observed of it was only the upper limbs of a tree that had roots deep in the immaterial? If this were the case, then consciousness really could persist after death.

  Perhaps we had the ability, upon death, to vacate the body through the escape hatch of its daisy particles. The dead were not truly dead, in this case, though neither were they floating around on clouds with harps. They were loosed from materiality and therefore from time and space; they had returned to a dimension of pure thought and intention, a dimension that, according to Sally’s experiments, was not entirely off-limits to us. After all, we weren’t all here, remember? Did we recall how at any given moment we were only ninety-three percent existent?

  One day, she said, in the not-so-distant future, we were going to better understand this process. We were going to figure out a way to harness the power of the daisy particles as they slid in and out of the physical world, and we were going to use them to open a stable line of communication with the immaterial world.

  One day, in other words, we would be able to converse with the dead. We would be able to reach them. We’d wasted so much time waiting for them to visit us when really it was us who should be visiting them.

  Thank you, she said. Thank you for having me here this morning.

  She clapped again.

  Except this time her right and left hands passed cleanly through each other and made no sound at all.

  A few people in the audience audibly sucked in their breath. Annie looked over at me incredulously. Seconds passed, I’m ashamed to say, before I remembered that Sally was a hologram, that whatever this was, it was a production technique, a trick of editing. She fluttered her fingers at us with a smile and then disappeared.

  After church my father invited me on a hike. He had, for a number of years, been a member of a hunt club that owned some two hundred acres of land outside of town, and once upon a time we’d routinely walked the trails in the nearby state park together. I hadn’t been out there with him in a long time. He had developed painful heel spurs that made walking long distances uncomfortable, but he informed me that he’d recently found some padded inserts for his boots that might help and he was ready to give it a try.

  To reach the trailhead, we drove right by the hunt club’s lodge, a glorified mobile home that sat about fifty yards off a gravel road. I’d been in there as a kid with my father a handful of times. Even now I can smell the trash out back, see its messy countertops stained with coffee rings and littered with dried crusts of food. I can remember, with precision, the wall of photographs of dead bucks and does on beds of crunchy brown leaves, bloody and wet, their twisted necks and dark eyes. This display had always put me in mind of the Polaroids you see pinned to evidence boards on detective shows.

  I’d never shot a deer—I was no hunter—and I think my father had always felt let down by my disinterest. I think he fancied himself the sort of person who’d be able to survive in the woods forever with nothing but a knife, and probably he could have. He could get a fire going with a flint in under three minutes, and every time we’d ever gone camping he’d insisted we use leaves instead of toi
let paper. He used to make me spray down with a foul-smelling liquid that he claimed was a natural mosquito and tick repellent, a putrid concoction whose chief ingredient, I discovered years later, was deer piss.

  Deer season had just opened. It was mid-October, but already the cold had settled into the mountains. The week before Shula had even had a few inches of snow, though it had melted by the following afternoon. I wore a thermal shirt under my field jacket, though I was soon sweating and had to carry the jacket under my arm. The sun was dim through the treetops and clouds, an overcast day. I glanced at my watch: Annie was at the theater by now, and Fisher was with her grandparents for the afternoon.

  My father sucked snot from his nose and hocked a loogie with a high glistening arc. The snot landed somewhere off in the leaves. After we’d been walking for a few minutes, we fell into a discussion about Sally Zinker.

  “One of the more interesting talks I’ve seen, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’d read about daisy particles before but never about anything like that.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure I totally understood everything she was saying. Annie and I were talking about it on the way home. The universe only ninety-three percent exists? Such a specific number.”

  “Well, it’s math, Jim.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we partly exist, that means we partly don’t exist, which means we’re all, already, a little bit dead?”

  He smiled. “There does seem to be some fluidity to it.”

  We followed a switchback in the trail. We were going downhill, into a narrow valley between two mountains. The woods were colder here—and quiet. We reached the bottom, where the trail elbowed up again, and hopped across a small trickling stream.

  “She didn’t mention the restaurant,” I said. “I guess I really didn’t expect her to, but I was hoping she might. Do you think she found a daisy hole there, too?”

  “That would make a certain sense. Given what we experienced there.”

  “What you experienced,” I corrected. “So do you think you passed through a daisy hole?”

  “I’m not sure.” My father stopped for a moment and, steadying himself against a tree, brought up his left foot. He stuck his finger in his boot and messed with the insert at his heel. “Whatever happened to me on the stairs, it was such a brief glimpse.”

  “A glimpse of what, though?”

  “The beyond? All that’s not this? I don’t know if there’s a good word for it, really. But it was incredibly real.” He smiled. “It was a gift. I used to be so certain we were just this”—he tugged at the skin on his arm—“but now? There’s just so much we don’t understand about ourselves. We aren’t who we think we are. We aren’t even where we think we are. I know that now. I’ve felt it.”

  Why had this happened to him—and not me? I was incredibly jealous. I’d been there, too, and yet the hand of whatever it was had reached out for my father and ignored me altogether. Compared with him, I was a pathetic sightless mole wriggling my way through the dark, wet soil, oblivious to the wonders that lived above the surface. We mole-people, we soul-less moles, we’d been born in the mud, and we’d die there, too, vegetated, dreamless.

  A gunshot echoed, not too far off, and something ripped through the nearby trees. We both froze and listened. My ears burned from the cold. We were about a half mile from the parking lot.

  “We should probably be wearing orange,” my father said.

  “That sounded pretty close.”

  He stepped into the brush and pointed to a pine tree. About six feet up its trunk was a long splintery gash where a bullet had grazed it.

  “That could have killed us,” I said, feeling more and more indignant. “This is a state park! What the hell are they doing all the way over here?”

  “They probably got turned around. That happens sometimes.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “You’re in a state park! Stop shooting!”

  No one shouted back. Whoever it was, probably they were embarrassed or scared. My father adjusted his boot insert again and started walking. He’d stayed so calm. It was infuriating. What if one of us had been shot through the head? Through the belly? If we’d been standing about five feet to the right, I’d have been bleeding out across the leaves, my father stooped over me, saying his goodbyes, telling me to hold on, telling me I was going to be fine.

  For the longest time after my heart had misfired, I’d felt as if a tremendous curtain had been pulled away from the end of my life, and I’d done my best to feel liberated rather than frightened by the knowledge of the nothingness that awaited me. If there was nothing, then no one was watching me or judging me or keeping track of my numerous sins, scribbling down my every terrible thought in a grand, cosmic logbook. I was free.

  But I had never really settled into that perspective. After all, what about all the others, the ones who’d nearly died, like me, but who had returned to report the inexorable happiness of God’s white, bright love? Some part of me feared that my experience wasn’t the rule but the exception. The oblivion I’d met, possibly, had flowed directly from the life I’d led up to that point. What if, fundamentally, I simply wasn’t a good enough person to deserve an afterlife? What if some people have no soul and I was one of them? What if I had seen no afterlife because I didn’t have the will or ability to believe in one? These were the questions that kept me awake some nights. I didn’t want to die again. I didn’t want to disappear! The world was at my back, pushing me toward it, shoving me over the edge of the grandest canyon, the darkest hole, down into that nonexistence.

  “Are you okay, Jim?” my father asked.

  I was having trouble breathing; my head spun; limbs tingled; deep in my chest a gawky bird was trying to escape my rib cage. I leaned forward until my hands were on the ground and stretched out across the trail. My father doubled back and knelt down beside me. Maybe I really had been shot and hadn’t even realized it.

  “Is it your heart?” he asked me, unable to hide his panic. “Jim, what should I do?”

  “I’m fine,” I managed to wheeze. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  Was I? I felt disconnected from my body. My head, swollen, was a hot-air balloon lifting free from my neck. I was dying! In the fucking woods! Like an animal! An animal-animal, I mean. My HeartNet had failed to do its job. Maybe I’d wandered too far off-track, too far from the towers, the satellites, whatever, and the device had lost contact with its maker in Sheldrick, California. I thought of Annie, pictured her face. If I focused on her image, would she be able to sense me as I departed the earth? Could I rouse the fine hairs on her neck and make her feel this last burst of love?

  A few minutes later I managed to catch my breath. My father had his beefy hands on my chest and seemed ready to perform compressions.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “You don’t need to worry.”

  He fell back onto his butt, and I dragged myself up into a sitting position.

  “I haven’t eaten much today,” I said—to him, to myself. “It’s just my blood sugar. I was just light-headed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I slid my phone out of my pocket and consulted my HeartNet app. No misfires. My heart was operating normally. I showed this to my father, but he didn’t seem convinced by it.

  He spat into the grass, and a little saliva dribbled down through his beard hairs. He wiped it away with his arm. Then he offered me a candy bar from his pocket, and we halved it. We sat there eating in silence, the caramel whiskering down our chins. Once I felt strong enough, I stood up and we resumed our hike. We reached the parking lot about twenty minutes later. In the car I turned on the heat.

  “You really scared me back there,” he said.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Has it happened before?”

  “I told you, I was just hungry.”


  We started driving. When we passed the hunt club lodge, two blue trucks were parked in front of it, and I wondered if these were the men who’d shot at us.

  By the time I reached home, I was scratching like hell. Something was crawling on my back, on my arms, on my legs, tiny tickles, only I couldn’t find the culprit. I stripped down in the bathroom and turned this way and that in the mirror. I couldn’t see anything on my skin. I called for Annie. She came upstairs in an apron and laughed when she saw me craning my neck for a better view of my back.

  “I need some help,” I said.

  She knelt down and examined me more closely, her fingers across my skin.

  “Tiny, itty bitty ticks,” she said, mildly distressed. “God, how’d this happen? This isn’t even tick season, is it? Aren’t they usually dead by now? There’s way too many to count.”

  When I asked her if these were the little black ones with two white spots or the little black ones with one big spot she said they were too small to tell. With the tweezers she plucked them loose from my skin, one by one. Every so often she ran the tweezers under the faucet. This went on for an hour. I was impressed by her diligence. I stood there naked, squinting at my arms, twisting my flesh around my bones for a better view. Down in the hairs, I could see them, like specks of dirt. I scraped them away with my fingernails.

  “Careful,” Annie said. “You don’t want to leave the mouths.”

  Finally I got into the shower and washed with hot water and soap, scrubbing hard.

  “Do you think they’re in my hair, too?” I asked her.

  She was sitting on the toilet, watching me. She shrugged. “I hope not.”

  For her sake, that night I slept on the couch. I didn’t want to set these little suckers loose in our bedsheets. In the morning Annie was standing over me with a cup of coffee, smiling sweetly. “It’s called a tick bomb,” she said. “I looked it up. You walked right through a tick bomb.”