But the past is the past, was my unconvincing refrain. We were Annie and Jim now, and I didn’t want to pry—or, more accurately, I didn’t want to give off the impression of being too interested in Anthony. Asking too many questions about him seemed to me undignified or weak or insensitive.
The result of this attitude, unfortunately, was that I knew so little about him and my imagination, if allowed, would work overtime to fill the void. The Anthony who took up residence in my head had a reedy voice, and what he had to say was always very chill and beach Zen. You do what you need to do, babe, I could hear him telling Annie. Don’t sweat it, I got this. Or, Let’s just listen to the ocean. Let the ocean guide you. The ocean knows best. The Anthony in my head was a hippie dream husband, a patient and thoughtful man, unbothered, unfussy, who didn’t sweat the small stuff, who spoke in koans, who knew the pressure points in a woman’s foot that could bring her to orgasm. This Anthony sang Annie to sleep at night while strumming a ukulele he’d found half buried in the sand.
I’m not sure who brought up Anthony at lunch. Kurt, I think, though I can’t say this with absolute certainty because we’d had a few drinks and it’s possible in my state I’d been bold enough to ask. As I recall, Kurt was telling me about the weekend Annie graduated from college, about a sunset cruise they’d all taken together, when he made an oblique reference to the fact that Anthony’s body had never been recovered after he drowned. I hadn’t heard this part of the story before.
“Yeah, you didn’t know that?” he asked. “He and his buddies were out kayaking, and they stopped for lunch and got drunk and stoned, and by the time they started to paddle back toward the car, it was getting dark. They think maybe he passed out. Super fucking sad, but if he was already unconscious at least maybe he went peacefully. Annie was down there for days, watching the divers try to find him, but they never did. God, it was awful, man. I didn’t think Annie would ever be the same again. I mean, things worked out all right, in the end, but it was bad there for a while.”
This was all news to me. I’d never heard about the divers, about Annie having been down there at the river, about their failure to ever locate the body.
“I think it’s pretty typical for them not to find it,” Kurt continued. “Maybe he wound up in the ocean. Fish food. Everything gets recycled anyway.” He smiled and took a big bite of a shrimp dumpling.
So, Anthony was not a body in a graveyard. He was ribs in a sea bed; a skull encrusted with barnacles, home for an eel; metacarpals in a shark’s stomach; pubis buried in an underwater trash heap of plastic bags and soda liters.
That didn’t stop Annie from taking Fisher to visit the gravesite, however.
A few weeks before Christmas we drove down to Charleston so that Fisher could visit with her grandparents, and on our way into town, we stopped by the cemetery.
The weather was eerily warm, almost seventy degrees, even though it was early December, and both Annie and Fisher were wearing cardigans over loose dresses. They sat down in the grass together at the foot of the tombstone, a family reunion. Fisher had hardly known her father, and so I don’t think she was capable of comparing me to him, but I was always very aware of my status as an impostor. That’s how I thought of myself, especially in that first year.
As Annie and Fisher communed with my predecessor, I decided to go for a long walk and give them some time alone. Exploring the endless rows of mowed grass and buried bodies, I kept myself distracted by trying to find the most ancient marker there. The oldest I saw belonged to a man who had died in 1801. The stone was so worn down I had to trace the shapes with my fingers to decipher the date. I had no desire to be buried. Or cremated, for that matter. I didn’t like to think about the fate of my body. I’ve read about people having their ashes compressed into stones that can then be fashioned into jewelry for those left behind. But to what occasion would one wear such an accessory? Oh, this? You like it? It’s my mother, actually.
Where were Clara and Robert Lennox buried? I wondered. For some reason, it had never occurred to me they might be buried somewhere in Shula.
Annie and Fisher were waiting for me by the car when I returned, ready to continue on to the next stop in the Anthony Warren memorial tour: his parents’ house, a beautiful white house situated near a marsh on one of the islands. The plan was to drop off Fisher there for a few days while Annie and I stayed in a hotel in town. I hadn’t met the Warrens yet. They were standing in the driveway when we arrived, both of them in untucked men’s dress shirts and garden shoes.
“Give your Gramma a kiss,” Annie told Fisher.
Gramma had a pleasant, wrinkled face, a light fuzz on her upper lip. She squeezed Fisher hard and then introduced herself to me as JoJo.
“And I’m Anthony,” Anthony’s father said.
I shook his hand, firmly, to communicate confidence, though being there, I felt anything but that. Already I suspected I’d made a gross miscalculation in volunteering to come along. They’d set up a game of croquet in the backyard, which I gathered was a tradition, and while the ladies played and chatted with iced teas, Anthony Sr. and I shucked corn on the back deck for a low-country boil. He was an athletic man with a small-featured face and close-together eyes. I could feel him studying me as I pulled loose the spidery string from the cob.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said, as if trying to convince himself.
“Thank you.”
“Annie seems happy, and that makes us happy.”
I nodded. “I know this must be a little strange.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, eyes narrowing, hands gone still.
I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well . . .”
“Not strange at all,” he said. “We’re delighted to meet you. Put a face to the name and all that.”
We watched the girls play croquet. Fisher knocked a ball too hard with her mallet and it rolled down a small hill into a small frog pond. Annie and JoJo were chatting, though they were too far away for me to understand what they were saying to each other.
“She really misses Annie,” he said, meaning JoJo. “We had two sons, but she always wanted a daughter, and she’d really come to think of Annie that way, as her own. They were very close until Annie left town.”
He grabbed a plastic shopping bag from between his legs and began to fill it with the corn husks.
“But we’re glad she’s found some real stability, we really are. As I’m sure you’ve heard, my son was a passionate guy. He wasn’t easy. His third-grade teacher, she nailed it on the head. ‘This one’s got spirit,’ she told us. ‘This one’s going to be trouble.’ People with big hearts, they don’t always know where the boundaries are, they have a hard time squeezing themselves into a normal life. They feel too much, you know? Now, our other son, William, he’s more like you, I think. He’s a producer for CNN, in Atlanta, very dependable, very unflappable. He’s smart, and he’s prudent. I don’t have to worry about him.” He let the bag fall down to his feet. “But you know, it’s strange, as a parent, I sort of miss the worrying. That must sound very odd, but Anthony, the way he was, it made me feel necessary. I had a role to play, if that makes sense. Will doesn’t need me like Anthony did. I’m not saying Will’s got the world figured out—he really doesn’t, despite what he says—but at least he’s focused.”
It was clear to me then that he’d already made a decision about me, that he had pegged me as a stable if boring alternative to his dead son. I was, in other words, Annie’s safety net. What Anthony and Annie had shared, he seemed to be saying, was big, was passionate, was boundless, was reckless, and what she’d found in me was something more comfortable and predictable. I was a Will, not an Anthony, whatever that meant, and behind this categorization lurked a not-so-gentle criticism of my entire personality, of my entire way of being. But he knew nothing about me, other than the scantest details—my job, age, the way I dressed (a button-down shirt and
khaki pants on that particular afternoon)—and how did that qualify him to make such assumptions about the largeness or smallness of my spirit, about the labyrinth of my heart? We cannot presume to know such things about people.
I excused myself to the bathroom. Sliding open the door, I stepped into the living room, which was well decorated, beach chic, a plush off-white couch, a low glass coffee table, wicker television cabinet. The bathroom was at the end of a short carpeted hallway. Conch shells ringed the sink, and a fat red scented candle burned in a silver tray on top of the toilet tank, filling the small room with an almost manly pinecone smell. I peed, rinsed my hands, and was on the way back to the living room when I passed an open door on my left, a bedroom with green walls and two twin beds. On the dresser by the window were photos in silver frames and above that, two Boy Scout merit badge sashes were pinned to the wall. I didn’t count badges, but the one on the right was almost full, top to bottom. Will’s, I assumed. The sash on the left had maybe eight badges in all: Swimming, Leatherworking, Wilderness Survival, and so on.
I was walking back into the living room when a framed picture flung itself from an end table—it really did seem that way to me then, as a flinging—and landed at my feet. Is it possible I knocked the table with my hip as I entered the room? Absolutely. I’ve replayed the scene a dozen times in my head, but our memories are highly unreliable and of little use in trying to re-create and understand these unusual moments. We are prone to exaggerate, to inflate, to deflate. We see only what seems significant in retrospect. And so I really can’t say with any degree of certainty how the picture came to be on the floor, but what’s undeniable is that it did come to be there.
Picking it up, I realized with dread that I was holding a picture of Anthony and Annie’s wedding day and not only that but the glass had cracked. Just to be clear, the glass had not cracked evenly down the middle, severing Anthony from his bride as they fed each other white wedding cake. It was not so dramatic as that. This was a spiderweb crack across the bottom of the photo. The shape and length of the crack symbolized nothing, as far as I could tell. Still, how was I going to explain it to everyone? I considered just setting the frame back on the table. If anyone noticed, I could play dumb. But they’d know that I’d been in the house—for going on ten minutes now—and they would suspect me. I knew this because I would have suspected me. I couldn’t just pretend it hadn’t happened, and that meant I’d have to come clean.
Finally, I went outside onto the deck with the photo in my hands, steeling myself for whatever came next. Mr. Warren had joined his wife and the girls out on the lawn. When I slid the door shut, they all turned to face me.
“What’s that?” Fisher asked, the first to notice I was holding something.
“You won’t believe this, but—” I said, already losing confidence, wishing I’d thought more carefully about what exactly to say. “Look, you have to understand this was a total accident, and I realize how terrible this is going to seem.”
“What is it, Jim?” Annie asked.
“I was coming through the living room and knocked the table and a photo fell. I didn’t even see what the photo was until I picked it up. I had no idea what it was.”
Mrs. Warren—JoJo—stepped up onto the deck and took the frame from me. “Oh,” she said.
“What?” Mr. Warren asked.
She showed the others.
“I’m very, very sorry,” I said.
“Jim, it’s fine,” she said.
“It was an accident,” Annie said. “No big deal.”
“It’s just glass,” Anthony Warren Sr. said, taking the frame from his wife. “The photo’s fine. You can’t break that.”
“Right,” I said, feeling relieved but also, suddenly, irritated. Everything Anthony Sr. said to me seemed vaguely threatening. What did he mean that I couldn’t break the photo? Did he want me to know that what Annie and Anthony had shared together, their wedding cake bliss, I’d never be able to touch that or replace it? I had the strange impulse to grab the photo from him and rip it into a hundred pieces. To light the pieces on fire.
The rest of our afternoon with them is a blur, obscured by the steam of their low-country boil, all that shrimp and corn and potatoes at the center of the table. I was too preoccupied with the wedding photo incident to pay careful attention to the conversation. I remember Fisher calling shrimp the cockroach of the sea. I remember JoJo asking Annie if she still liked peanut butter cookies. I remember the contented smile that splashed across the woman’s face when Annie said that she did, as if this knowledge implied not just a familiarity, unbroken, but a kind of possession.
—
ANNIE AND I STAYED at the Omni in downtown Charleston for the next two nights and on Sunday morning we picked up Fisher from her grandparents and headed back north to Shula. We were halfway home when the Suburban just ahead of us swerved wildly to avoid a police officer who was standing perilously close to the edge of the highway with a radar gun in his hand. The Suburban sideswiped the car in the adjacent lane and then careened back in the other direction and rolled down off an embankment along the side of the road. This happened so quickly that I hardly reacted at all. I had no time to brake or accelerate or scream. I looked over at Annie, who was reading a magazine, and back at Fisher, who was in the backseat on her phone. When I told them what had just happened, they didn’t believe me at first. Neither one of them had seen a thing. I described the cop to them, his aviator sunglasses, his shaved head, the glint of his badge, his dark brown broom of a mustache. A movie cop, in other words. A total cliché. The absence of a police car was suspicious, Fisher said, because what was the point of checking speeds if you couldn’t then pursue, and I admitted that was a fair point. I even began to doubt myself a little. Maybe I’d dreamed it up. Maybe it hadn’t really happened.
But then, a few miles later, we spotted another cop on the side of the road.
I slowed a little so that we could observe him together. This second cop was identical to the first. An exact copy. His muscles bulged in his shirt. He pointed his radar gun directly at us, as if in admonishment, and his head turned ever so slightly as we passed.
He was a hologram.
All at once, it seemed, they were among us, these laser beam cousins of ours, air suffused with color and light and personality. We marveled at them, their movements, their particularity, their seeming vitality. They thrummed with life. We couldn’t always tell the difference between us and them, not at first. A trained eye was required, especially from a distance. Walking through one seemed discourteous, and so we sidestepped, mumbled apologies unthinkingly, as if they cared.
Sometimes our curiosity would overwhelm us. Incapable of embarrassment, the children were usually the first to make the approach, to step inside a body, to wave their arms about, to laugh and giggle. We adults tried to be less conspicuous. We’d pretend not to notice what we were doing, surfing our palms into the light, swiping, testing.
But where were the mirrors, the projectors, the lamps, the plates? We searched in vain for the equipment or machinery responsible for delivering them here. The technology had advanced to such a point that the holograms were no longer tied to any obvious hardware or surface. Projector drones, reflective resins that could be painted on any surface—different companies, we learned, had developed different techniques. Reports even began to surface about a particular type of hologram that bypassed the physical world entirely and interacted directly with our brains. That is to say, somehow, this company was altering our perception of reality without us even realizing it, making us see and hear things that weren’t really there, though these reports were all unverified, not to mention the fact that I’m not sure images produced in this fashion, technically, would even have qualified as holograms.
Grammers, I began to hear them called. A catch-all term for the walking and talking mirages.
Always, I was thinking about daisy
particles, of a universe that only partly exists. Could one thing truly exist more than another? Were there gradients of existence?
They were immigrants from another dimension. Visitors. Passers-thru. Salesmen, too. Corporate shills. Ad campaign faces. Champions of causes and charities. Purveyors of fine linens and French fries. Hawkers of form-fitting mattresses and intelligent thermostats. Sometimes they were recognizable, even famous. Tom Bradys now stood outside every Subway in America, suave, confident, doing their best to lure you inside for a delicious foot-long turkey and provolone on wheat. Jim Carreys with giant scraggly beards loitered in urgent-care parking lots and tried to convince you not to vaccinate your children. Was that Salma Hayek modeling diamond bracelets in the window of your local jewelry store?
The dead were exhumed, reanimated, returned to us. Prince performed a sold-out show at the theater in downtown Shula, and I overheard a guy ask his date, earnestly, why Prince hadn’t put out any records in so long. Not long after that I was on my way to a meeting with the city planning commissioner when I witnessed Robin Williams leap onto a park bench and tell a series of jokes in which he somehow segued, in rapid order, from Mahatma Gandhi’s sex life to Bugs Bunny’s carrot obsession to the last words of Jesus on the cross. We could see the dark hair over his forearms, a wrinkle in his T-shirt, the sparkle of sweat across his brow. I’d never seen Robin Williams in anything but his movies, and this impromptu routine was a revelation, no matter how macabre. About fifty people had gathered around him by the time he took a bow and thanked everyone for listening. He then directed our attention to a nearby booth for Amnesty International and asked us all to make whatever donations we could to such a worthy cause.
The White Hairs didn’t care for the holograms, generally. I think they were confused by them, especially the more interactive and intelligent ones—the algorithmically advanced super-Grammers and so forth. A Grammer shoe clerk in the department store would offer assistance, and the White Hair, not realizing what they were talking to, would become upset when the clerk could only make suggestions and offer compliments and not actually deliver the right sizes. “I want to talk to your manager,” the disgruntled old-timer would say. “Bring me your manager. Do you hear me? Where’s the manager?” The Shula City Council, long dominated by White Hairs, narrowly passed a new law to keep the holograms off public property, which hardly mattered. They proliferated anyway. They followed us through the aisles of the grocery store, asking if we knew about the two-for-one special on canned chickpeas. They were parking lot attendants, waving us toward empty spaces. They were receptionists behind the front desk at the dentist’s office, pointing to forms.
The Afterlives Page 15