—
A WOMAN APPEARED at the entrance of our bank one morning. I hadn’t seen her enter. She was blond-haired and busty, dressed in a dark skirt and blazer, and rather than approach the counters she stayed standing just inside the doors with a pleasant smile on her face. She looked as if she might be waiting for someone to arrive, but after a half hour, Darryl poked his head in my office to ask if we needed to be concerned. He was thoroughly creeped out by this woman, enough so that he didn’t feel comfortable bothering her. I volunteered to speak with her myself. As I approached, she turned and welcomed me to the bank. Then she asked me how she might be of service.
“Service?” I asked.
“What sort of transaction are you here to make this morning? A deposit, perhaps? I can help you find the deposit slips.”
“I work here, actually. That’s my office over there.”
“Wonderful, I love meeting coworkers.”
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She only smiled at me happily. Which is to say, eerily.
“Forgive me,” I said. “But you’re a hologram, right? You’re a Grammer?”
She nodded. “But please, call me Diana.”
The Fortune Tellers were watching me from across the lobby, unable to hear this conversation. To give them a shock, I waved my hand through the Grammer’s face, as if to slap her. The hologram didn’t react at all.
“Where are you being projected from?” I asked her.
She smiled. “I’m sorry?”
“I don’t understand how it is you’re here right now. Where’s the projector?”
“If you like to report a problem with my service, please email diana-at-holo-help-dot—”
“I don’t need to report a problem, but thank you.”
I wandered back over to the Fortune Tellers. When I told Diana that she and the hologram shared a name, she laughed but then, very quickly, turned morose. She didn’t want to share a name with—with that thing. She didn’t understand: Of all the names in the world, why Diana? Couldn’t we call it Helen or Audrey or any other name instead? Certainly the hologram didn’t have a preference? Certainly it didn’t think of itself as Diana when no one was talking to it?
When I called our corporate offices to complain on all our behalf, I was told that Diana was the name assigned to her by her manufacturer. We now had Dianas in over 312 of our branches at that very moment. There was no way to change the name, in other words. We were stuck with her, with this lady by the door, this lady who never changed her clothes or her hair or her smile, whom we could hear reminding every single customer about our new e-checking accounts with overdraft protection, who presumably stood there not only all day but all night, too, alone in the darkness, emotionless as the cleaning crew vacuumed at her feet.
We could become holograms ourselves now, too, if we pleased. Holographic recording shops started popping up all over the country—HoloYou, The Slammin’ Grammin, and all the rest. Places where you could pay by the hour for the chance to record your story and be immortalized as a hologram. One day, the idea went, your great-great-grandchildren would be able to sit side-by-side with your hologram.
Our bank gave a loan to one such business, called Hologramophone, which set up shop in an old redbrick building close to downtown on Ivar Street, a building that, as it happened, had once been a furniture store called Lennox & Sons. Initially I thought this an amazing coincidence, to have stumbled upon a second building in as many years with a connection to the Lennox family, but then again, all the old buildings in Shula were constantly being either demolished or repurposed.
A few days before Hologramophone officially opened its doors, I took my father with me for a quick tour. The walls were still wet with paint. Construction debris and dust still littered the distressed concrete floors. Behind the front desk, on an austere white wall, loomed a large stenciled drawing of Thomas Edison and a phonogram, the rudimentary recording device he’d invented.
A tech—a young guy with long dark sideburns—led us past the lobby and down a long hallway of recording booths in which customers would be able to record a private message. For a spouse, for children, descendants, for the public, for posterity. They’d even have the option to time capsule it by checking a little box on a form: Make this message available to ______ in five years, ten years, a thousand years. In the future, people would be able to scroll through a list of names organized by topic or decade, select yours, and then beam you into their kitchens to learn about your life while they prepared dinner. Historians would decorate their talks and presentations with a chorus of primary-source holograms.
A new way to be remembered, the company claimed. A new way to connect. To preserve and be preserved.
The tech asked if we—my father or I—wanted to try it, and my father volunteered. He went into a booth, stepped on the two footprint decals on the floor, and, as directed, faced a milky white floor-to-ceiling panel. A tumorous red light flashed from within the wall, indicating that he was now being recorded. The door whizzed shut. Like a door from a spaceship. The tech smiled at me: Pretty cool, huh? My father emerged a few minutes later, laughing at himself.
“I had no idea what to say.”
“Typically we’ll advise people to write something down first,” the tech said, nodding.
We returned to the lobby. The space had been gutted half a dozen times since it had been a furniture store, but Robert Lennox had stood here once, he’d stood in this exact spot among the settees and wardrobes. He was a real person, I reminded myself. Not a character in a ghost story. He’d really lived and really died. The furniture store had gone out of business a few years before the fire, but I’d never been able to find any records of his employment after that. He and Clara had never had any children. The facts of their lives, as I knew them, offered only a cold outline, a rough sketch.
I did know, however, that they’d been buried alongside one another not too far from the old furniture store—in a cemetery of the South Methodist Church. Though I wasn’t exactly sure what I expected us to find there, other than their names on the tombstones, I asked my father if he wanted to go with me to find their graves after we’d left the hologram shop. We drove together in my car.
The cemetery was a small grassy square enclosed by a low stone wall. On Clara’s tombstone was a small bouquet of flowers.
“What do you make of that?” I asked.
“She’s been dead for almost a hundred years. I doubt she’s got any relatives left.”
“Maybe it’s a service someone provides for all the old graves. A flower guild or something.”
My father grabbed a flower and held it to his nose for a sniff, then returned it to the grave. I thought of their bodies down deep in the coffins, long since decomposed, their perfectly laid out bones. Devoted Wife, Clara’s marker said. She was thirty when she died, four years younger than me. I shut my eyes for a moment and quietly let the Lennoxes know that we were here, that we wished them well and they therefore didn’t need to bother us or mess with our heads. Not that I really thought they could hear me. It was an old habit, what I was doing, one that had sprung up from a dumb childhood belief that ghosts hanging around cemeteries had the power to enter my head and read my thoughts.
“You’ve read about Zinker’s idea for a Reunion Machine,” I said.
He nodded.
“You think it’s possible?”
“Possible? Of course. What isn’t these days? But I’m not convinced that’s what we need, a world where the living can talk to the dead whenever they want. Life is confusing enough as it is.”
“You think it would create confusion? I’d think it would clear a few things up. If you knew for a fact that we go on existing after we die?”
“Well, even with a machine like that, you’d never know it for a fact.”
“Says the man who got pulled into some sort of ghost vort
ex on a staircase.”
He smiled sheepishly. “I admit it was a profound experience. But it hardly answered any of my questions. I have a confession to make. I went back there recently—to the restaurant. I was driving by and saw a guy doing some maintenance work and convinced him to let me inside. I must have stood on those stairs for a half hour. Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
He shrugged. “The farther I get from it, the less I know what to make of what happened to me the night we were there together. Maybe I’d had too much coffee, and my heart skipped a beat.
“But the mark on your arm. The handprint . . .”
“Everything has an explanation. What I mean is, there’s nothing we’re not willing to come up with an explanation for. Anything miraculous or amazing that happens to us in life, our brains are trained to pick it apart. To be skeptical. To create doubt. Think of the Pythia—the Oracle at Delphi—and her visions. People back then believed she could see past, present, and future. She could slide back and forth in time. She could speak to the gods.”
“We should all be so lucky.”
“Yes, but did you catch that scientist a couple of weeks ago at The Church? I forget her name. She studied the temple and she thinks that the oracle was probably hallucinating thanks to some vapors that escape through fractures in the rocks. She was breathing these fumes all day. The priestess was high, like, ninety percent of the time! So, it would be very easy to dismiss what she had to say as a product of those fumes, right? Admit it: Your brain wants you to. Our brains are very pleased with themselves when they can discount something incredible. When they can return the world to normal. You hear a voice on a tape, and somebody tells you it’s a ghost. OK, what do you do next? You start thinking of all the reasons why it isn’t, why it couldn’t be. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to find logical, rational explanations for things. Because we should! I’ve spent my whole life doing that. But at a certain point, you either trust that there’s more than meets the eye—or you don’t.”
We both looked at Clara’s tombstone again.
“Like these flowers,” he said. “Who put them here? For Clara Lennox. That’s what I want to know. That’s what my brain is trying to explain to me right now.”
A lawn mower revved to life. A groundskeeper, a man with wild gray hair, was cutting the grass along the sidewalk in front of the church. He waved his gloved hand at us, and I nodded. We were on our way toward the wrought-iron gate through which we’d entered the cemetery, when he killed the lawn mower’s engine and called over to us. He wanted to know if we needed any help.
“Sure,” my father said.
“Nobody’s been buried here since the sixties,” the man reported as he walked up to us.
“Yes, it looks very old,” I said.
“Y’all don’t go to church here, do you?” he asked.
I explained we were just out for a walk, we were only exploring.
“If you’re looking for Mary Pam, I can show you exactly where she’s buried,” he said.
“Who’s Mary Pam?”
“Oh, she was a writer, back in the twenties. She wrote a book called The Carnival Children. I’ve never read it, but I’m told it’s about lesbians. She’s the one most people come to see. She’s always got fresh flowers on her grave. I gather she’s something of an icon. But she’s not the only famous person buried here. We’ve also got Eustace Wilton. He wrote religious music and was a hero in the War Between the States. And there’s Wendell Lennox, he was a big-time screenwriter.”
My father and I exchanged glances.
“Lennox?” I asked.
“Don’t ask me what movies he made. I couldn’t tell you. I’m no film buff. This was back in the forties and fifties. I don’t really go in for old movies. I figure anything worth watching gets remade anyway.” He smiled. “Boy, times like these I wish I had a pamphlet I could offer you. For years I’ve been telling anybody who’ll listen—every cemetery needs a pamphlet! It would tell you a little bit about all the people buried there. Wouldn’t that be something? It would lead you on a little tour.”
“There’s a grave over there, another Lennox,” my father said. “Clara Lennox. There are some flowers on her stone. Is there any chance you know who left them there?”
The man rubbed his chin. “I doubt I could say. I’m only out here a few hours a week.”
“It’s no problem. I was just curious.”
I thanked the man for the information, and my father and I walked to my car. I drove him back to the hologram shop, where he was parked.
“See you Sunday,” he said and slapped my knee before getting out.
He slapped my knee, he got out of the car and told me he’d see me Sunday, but did I say anything to him in reply?
Most of the time, my memories of my father are a jumble, one moment sliding into the next. When I think about him, he is saluting me from the doorstep. He is pulling out the chair for my mother at a seafood restaurant on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday; he is cracking his knuckles on a cold morning in a deer stand; he is jangling the loose change in his pockets; he is singing along to a song on the radio; he is asleep on the couch with a book on his lap; he is in a classroom drawing a parabola on the white board; he is massaging my mother’s neck to help her migraine; he is sliding his hand back and forth across his bald head; he is laughing at himself for ordering a latte instead of an old-fashioned plain black coffee.
He is seated beside me in the car after a trip to the graveyard, a speck of dirt in his goatee, his hand digging around in his pockets for his car keys. It’s always the car keys I think about, the way he leaned toward me to fish them free from his right pocket, his heavy breath, but for whatever reason, I can’t recall if I said anything to him before he set off for his car. I try not to torture myself.
Anyway, that day was among our last together. I missed church that Sunday, but we did get coffee that same week, and then later I was over at the house to help my mother with something, I forget what, and he popped downstairs to say hello. In truth, he lived another three months after our trip to the hologram shop and the graveyard, and I must have seen him half a dozen times, but it’s always that trip to Clara’s grave that hangs in my head as our final moment together.
A few weeks after he died—from a stroke—I worked up the courage to return to Hologramophone and inquire about his recording. My father hadn’t signed any paperwork as his session had been something of a demonstration, but I was grateful to learn that the tech had saved it anyway. I was given a small black cube, about the size of a ring box, and then shown into a small private lounge with a long gray couch and orange ottomans, very modern and slick. The cube had only two silver buttons: Play and Stop. When I clicked Play he immediately warbled into existence just a few feet away from me, a genie conjured from the lamp. He stood above me, as tall as he’d been in life. His shirt was bunched oddly at one shoulder, and his belt buckle was twisted slightly to the left of his navel. He looked down, at his shoes, which touched the ground, then up again, over my head.
“So I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do,” he said and then was quiet for a few moments, a very serious expression on his face. He hardly moved at all. I thought maybe that it was a technical glitch, that he’d frozen, until the muscles in his throat flexed as he swallowed. All at once he began to dance, an odd little jig, his arms gyrating at his sides as his feet shuffled and tapped and swept. This went on for almost twenty seconds before he stopped, abruptly, and smiled at his feet.
“Well,” he said, “that’s it, I guess.”
MAY HOPSTEAD GADD
MAY IS WEARING a bright yellow dress for the occasion of her sister’s wedding. She holds up a small mirror so that Clara can fix her hair. Clara is the more beautiful sister, so slim and elegant, but May, only twelve, already suspects she is the smarter one. On the shelf, above Clara’s head, she spies a book cal
led Religious Ecstasies and fights the urge to grab it. She asks her sister if she’s sure she wants to do this, if she really wants to marry Robert.
May has never understood the appeal of the Lennox brothers. Wendell was handsome, certainly, but he was the vainest boy May has ever met, and she was grateful when he ran off to la-la land and left Clara in the lurch. As for Robert, he isn’t attractive at all. His clothes appear to conceal nothing but knobs and joints, and his brow protrudes so far it keeps the sunlight from his eyes. Not only that, but he’s positively mopey. Brooding! May can’t imagine ever planting her lips upon a man such as that, no matter what’s in his bank account. Surely it’s the money that Clara’s interested in. Because if not the money, then what? Maybe Clara should have followed Wendell out West, after all, and tried her luck in California.
—
WENDELL’S PICTURE is in the newspaper. He’s died. May hasn’t seen him in more than fifty years, and there he is, white-haired, corpulent. She’s sitting at her usual table at Myers, the diner she eats at before work on Friday mornings. The waiter brings her the wrong omelet. He apologizes and promises to return promptly with the right one. Spinach, onions, and sausage—how hard is that to get right? She tips the creamer into her coffee, watches it swirl down into the blackness. She’s eating alone, as she does most days. For the last thirty years, she’s reported every morning at 7:30 a.m. to City Hall, where she works for the planning commission. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s a good one. She can’t imagine retiring.
The Afterlives Page 16