Is there anything more lovely than a beautiful woman’s hair held aloft as it passes through a shirt hole in reverse? Stomach, breasts, neck, chin, nose, eyes, hair sliding out last of all as a lustrous tumble back down across the shoulders?
Often we’d have to wait until Fisher was out. For school, for band practice. We’d meet at home during our lunch breaks and avail ourselves of the entire house. Sunlight streaming through the windows, we’d undress in the living room, our bodies fully revealed, the little stray hairs, the freckles, an unevenly clipped toenail (mine), some mild cellulitis along the upper arms (hers), the smell of her lavender deodorant, my aftershave. Sex in the daytime is somehow both more intimate and transactional.
Underneath me, her mouth smooshed hard against my shoulder, her wet breath vibrated my skin. She’d scratch at my back. I’d tug at her hair. We pushed at each other, pressed, groped, clawed, slapped, twisted, tweaked. Red finger-shaped marks formed around my neck. My saliva glistened on her chest. Gentle acts of violence. Violent acts of gentleness. On floors, counters, couches. We’d make love—and then linger with each other for as long as possible. There were two-hour lunches. Three-hour. We’d tell each other things. Confess. Unburden. One afternoon, as Annie stretched out beside me on the guest bed, she let me know that I was not the first person she’d slept with since Anthony’s death. I told her that was hardly surprising since he’d been dead for seven years when we met.
“There were two others,” she said.
I shrugged and said that wasn’t really a shocking number. In fact, though I didn’t say this, two in seven years seemed a little low to me.
“Well, what would be a shocking number?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, wanting to be careful. “Ten or twelve?”
“It was three, actually. I’m not sure why I lied.”
I wasn’t either. “Who was the third? Who did you leave off?”
“Nobody in particular.”
I suspected this wasn’t the case. I imagined three faces, one with a game show’s red X through it. “If you had to lose one, who’d it be?” I asked. “Who wouldn’t make the cut? Don’t say me.”
She smiled, baggily, and touched my arm. “Not you.”
“Who, then?” I asked uncertainly.
“If I tell you, you’ll think less of me.”
“Impossible,” I said.
She scooted to the end of the bed and sat between my open legs to face me, her hands on my knees. She didn’t have on any underwear, but she was still wearing her bra, which in our rush we’d neglected to remove.
“It happened right after Anthony died,” she said, already blushing. “I was packing up the house in Charleston, and one of his friends came over to help me get some of the heavy stuff down the stairs. I honestly can’t remember who initiated it, but I felt terrible, even as it was happening. He was Anthony’s best friend.”
She covered her face with her hands and peeked at me through her fingers. “You’re judging me,” she said.
“Not at all. You were grieving. People act strangely when they’re sad.”
“I could have stopped it though.” She seemed disgusted with herself. “I haven’t talked to him since. I think we both felt too guilty to face each other after that.”
I wasn’t sure what to say—or what she wanted me to say. Did she need to be comforted? Consoled?
“I’ve never told that to anyone,” she said.
I leaned forward to place my hands on her outer thighs. She had confessed to me this sad thing and nobody else. Nobody else in the entire world. This felt incredibly significant to me. “I don’t think any less of you,” I said, hoping this would communicate all I was feeling in that moment, that I desired all of her—her weaknesses, her failures, her shames. I wanted to know everything. I removed her bra, stretched her out, kneaded at her back, her butt, with my knuckles and palms. I slid my fingers into the cracks of her armpits, sucked on her earlobes, lay down on top of her, tongued her shoulder blades.
We made love a second time. We fell asleep. I missed a meeting. Made a call. Apologized. Blamed a stomach bug, a bad lunch. Rushed back to the bank. Ignored the odd gaze of the Fortune Tellers as I beelined for my office.
I didn’t care. I was in love, and nothing else mattered to me. Sitting in my office chair, Annie two miles away at the theater, I swear I could feel the hum of every single atom that connected us across that distance.
I was downtown to meet with a prospective client for lunch one afternoon and afterward stopped by a used bookstore. Small carts outside the door were loaded with discounted paperbacks. The man who owned the shop was a White Hair, an older gentleman with a large head and square shoulders and dark eyes. He had the look of a man who read military histories on his lunch break. He was behind the register eating an apple when I walked in, and I nodded to him as I passed. The bookstore itself was very small and cramped, the floors as gunky as old mousetraps.
I wandered the labyrinth of teetering bookcases until eventually I was standing in the science section, at least a third of which was devoted to plant guides and bird books. The books were arranged by author, and the Z’s were way down on the lowest shelf. I crouched down and turned my head sideways. I couldn’t believe it, there it was, a slim hardback book, The Reunion Machine by Sally Zinker.
That I’d found it here in this decrepit used bookshop seemed significant to me, perhaps even fated. The title appeared in bold yellow letters on the front cover, like headlights through a highway fog. Beneath the title, it said, A Physicist Breaks Down the Barriers Between the Living and the Dead.
I flipped through it quickly. In her author photo, Sally appeared to be a few years younger than she had as a hologram. Her face was tilted slightly so that she was peering down at the camera, and her arms were crossed in such a way that, in a musical perhaps, would have suggested toughness.
I turned the book over to examine the jacket copy. What if, it asked, there is no such thing as past, present, and future? What if everything is happening all at once? What if the material world sprang from a single thought? What if, upon our death, the shackles of time are broken and we are released to wander through our lives? What if there was a way to outmaneuver time and space and communicate with those who’ve died?
When I slid the book across the counter, we opened it for the price and then started reading the jacket copy.
“Huh,” he said. “You interested in this sort of stuff?”
I shrugged.
“I’ve got a friend who swears he used to get messages from one of his high school teachers, a lady who taught him French. They were real close. We used to call her his girlfriend. Anyway, she died, in a plane crash, and for a few months after that, my friend would wake up some nights speaking French. The message was always the same, he said. Your book. Your book. Ton livre. Ton livre. Finally, one day he got to thinking, and he opened up his old French textbook—and guess what?”
“What?”
“You won’t believe it, but she’d written him a recommendation letter for college, and it was in the book. Right there in the book!”
“That’s amazing.”
He nodded. “It is, it is. It was sort of a shame though because my friend had already sent out his applications. Still, amazing, yes.”
I paid the guy $6.50.
—
I DIDN’T HAVE A CHANCE to read the book for a few more days, when I took it with me on a work trip to Atlanta. I read the first few chapters on the plane and then another fifty pages while eating dinner alone after my meetings. I called my father on my walk back to the hotel and told him what I’d been reading.
“That’s fantastic,” he said. “You’ll have to let me borrow it when you’re done.”
His voice was in my ear thanks to an earbud, and it was easy to imagine he was walking right alongside me.
&nbs
p; “Listen,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. You proposed to me once that we should make some sort of pact, that whoever dies first should try to get a message to the other person.”
“I said we should do this?”
“It would be something very simple. An image or, like, a sentence.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Just something easy to remember but specific enough that it couldn’t be random.”
“The proof is in the pudding,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“That could be our message. Proof is in the pudding. Easy to remember, right?”
“How about, I’m still here?”
“A little creepy, don’t you think? Maybe a song. ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz.’”
“If you’re blue, and you don’t know where to go—” I sang.
“Why don’t you go where fashion sits. Exactly.”
“Let’s give this message some more thought. We’ll figure it out.”
“Whatever it is, how will we transmit?”
“A dream. A crystal ball. Highway billboard. A giant skywriting airplane. Whatever it takes, doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, let’s do it. Let’s give it a try.”
I read a few more chapters before going to bed that night—and then skimmed to the end on the plane the next day. Annie picked me up at the airport and was waiting for me outside Arrivals when I came through the sliding doors. She gave me a long kiss after I dropped my bag into the backseat of the car. Once we were on the highway she hit the gas hard, and we surged forward through traffic. We were doing ninety, at least.
She’s always been this way in a car. She drives as if the place we’re going might no longer exist if we don’t reach it in time. If someone cuts her off or slams on the brakes unexpectedly, Annie doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t yell or get upset or express any sort of frustration. Cool, collected, precise—she could have been a NASCAR driver. Her entire body seems to work in perfect communion with the car. Where her foot contacts the pedal I think of the Sistine Chapel, the invisible spark traveling between the almost-touching fingers of God and Adam.
All this to say, we were home from the airport in record time, and our rush to the house—my raising the key before we’d even reached the door, her dropping my bag at the foot of the stairs, the unbuttoning of blouses and shirts as I followed her into the living room—all of it seemed like an extension of the drive itself: precise, coordinated, efficient. We’d both memorized the operating manual, we knew the conditions of the road, we’d plugged the destination into the GPS of our bodies.
Afterward I stayed right where I was, not letting her go. We were on the floor, and I was on top of her. Her legs, which had been lashed around my back, were resting on the ground. She kissed the top of my head and patted my shoulder, indicating she was ready for me to roll over, but I didn’t want to budge, not yet. I didn’t want her to release me. I was very glad to be home. She tapped my back again.
“We don’t have much longer,” she said.
Fisher was at her friend’s house. Another band practice.
I rolled off her and reached for my bag. I brought out Sally Zinker’s book and handed it to her.
“You bought her book?”
“It’s about ten years old.”
Amused, Annie read some of the chapter titles aloud: Grief Makes Ghost Hunters of Us All. A Failure of Space and Time. The Ghost Particle. A Partial Existence. The Daisy Dead. The Future Dead. A Reunion Machine.
“So what’s the reunion machine?”
I smiled. “Get this—it’s a device that would allow you to talk with the dead. It’s got something to do with the daisy particles, with taking control of the particle’s on/off switch.”
“Wait, is it something she’s already built or—?”
“Unclear. Either she’s built it and she’s being cagey about it, or she’s simply suggesting such a machine could, hypothetically, be built, at some point, someday.”
“So you’ve read this whole book already?”
“Most of it, yeah.”
“How does the reunion machine work exactly? I mean, is it like a telephone?”
“She’s a little vague on the mechanics of it.”
I’d wondered the same thing. The chapter about the machine contained no schematics or diagrams or illustrations, and so imagining it was a challenge. A telephone, a pane of glass through which one could observe the spirit world, a special bodysuit that somehow projected you into the great beyond—anything seemed possible. Annie flipped back to the beginning, to the introduction.
“What about the Dog on Fire? Is that anywhere in here?”
“She doesn’t talk about the Lennoxes, no, but she does write a little bit about a restaurant with a winding staircase, which I’m sure must be Su Casa Siempre. It’s one of about a dozen sites where she detected a daisy hole.”
The back door squeaked open, and Annie and I jumped up off the floor fast. She stepped into her skirt. I couldn’t seem to get my belt to buckle right. We were both shirtless when Fisher and her friend C-Mac strode into the living room together, their instruments in black gig bags. Seeing us, C-Mac giggled and turned red. I told them I’d just arrived home.
“No shit,” Fisher said.
“Fisher,” Annie said. “Language.”
“We’re going downstairs to practice,” Fisher said, irritated with all of us, with the world.
When they were gone, Annie and I continued dressing.
“Don’t worry about her,” she said, buttoning her blouse. “She’s just in a new dumb phase.”
And I thought: Who isn’t?
We worried about Fisher’s friendship with C-Mac. There was no democracy in this friendship of theirs. Annie had overheard C-Mac telling Fisher with the noxious flair of a cruise director what their plans were for the weekend. I’d walked into the house one afternoon and discovered C-Mac bending Fisher’s body into strange yoga contortions that she said might help Fisher with her posture. Her posture’s fine, I said. You don’t know what you’re talking about, C-Mac snapped. If any of this bothered Fisher, she never admitted it. She always seemed pleased to have C-Mac’s attention, no matter how domineering and abrasive her friend could be.
The girl lived in a very modern home—it reminded me of a glass worm as painted by a cubist—on the west side of town. The roof was a giant solar panel. The driveway was a solar panel, too, apparently. Their three cars were all sleek and electric. Most of the time the girls practiced over there, and since Fisher was still two years away from her driver’s license, we were constantly carting her back and forth.
I picked her up there one afternoon and we were almost home when she started giggling. I asked her what was so funny, and she showed me her phone screen.
“Past life app,” she said. “You answer a bunch of questions and it tells you about all your past lives. I was a Viking warrior, a devotee of the god Loki. My ship was called the Dragon’s Blood, and we sailed to France and conquered Paris. I didn’t survive the battle, sadly. A spear caught me right in the gut.” She patted her stomach wistfully. “The last thing I remember thinking, as I lay there sprawled across the stones, blood gushing out of me, was how much I was going to miss all my pillaging and raping. I was very good at it.”
“I doubt that.”
“I burned your village down, actually. You were a peasant farmer back then, and I killed all your sheep and your children and I had sex with your wife.”
“That’s not funny. It’s actually a little disturbing. I was asking you a serious question.”
“And I’m giving you a serious answer, sort of. The app is stupid, but reincarnation is where it’s at, Jim. It makes total sense. You’ve been a slave, a master, an idiot, a genius. Actually, it’s even weirder than that because there’s no such thing as you and me, not really. Us be
ing individual souls, it’s all an illusion. All of us are little leaves on the same house plant. God’s got a major-major case of split personality. He’s like this crazy sci-fi writer, and he’s writing seven billion stories at once in his head.”
I thought: But if I’m only a character in a story, then will I still exist after the story ends? After all, characters are only constructs, clusters of attributes and personality, a roulette, hypotrochoidal images produced when one circle rolls inside another, larger one. One could argue the character lives only as long as the reader remembers him, but I couldn’t tell if Fisher’s analogy allowed for any actual readers. God alone produced and consumed these stories. He fed upon his own fantasies.
“If I’m God’s fantasy, I feel sorry for God,” I said.
She smiled. “You’re, like, point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one percent of God’s fantasy. Remember, he’s writing Gandhi and George Clooney and Amelia Earhart, too.”
“Where’d you learn all this stuff?” I asked her. “Are they teaching this stuff in schools now? Do you take religion in middle school?”
She waved her phone at me, the font of all knowledge.
“But past lives really would explain so much,” she said. “Like, C-Mac’s convinced her dad had something terrible happen to him last time around.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s just such a mad guy, you know?”
“Mad how?”
She shrugged. “Just mad.”
Later that night, when Annie and I pressed for more details, a fuller picture emerged. The man had a serious temper. He yelled sometimes. He’d called C-Mac a bitch once. He’d kicked a cooler across the yard when he thought Fisher and C-Mac had ripped the pool liner (which they hadn’t, she said). While they’d been practicing earlier that week, he’d stomped into the garage, flung a hammer at the wall, and screamed at them to shut the fuck up. As she tossed off these stories, Fisher seemed more amused than bothered by this behavior, which only made us worry more. Didn’t she know adults weren’t supposed to throw hammers and yell obscenities at children?
The Afterlives Page 13