“The ambulance is on the way,” she said. “Are you okay? What’s happening?”
“It’s not my heart,” I said. “I’m fine. Cancel the ambulance. Call them back.”
“You looked like you were dying!”
“Well, I’m not. Not today anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, yes, I’m sure.”
She seemed unconvinced. I moved back toward the sump pump and stuck my hands in the water. I was covered in a silky dark, foul-smelling grime. After locating both phones, I apologized for having lost my cool. She didn’t say anything.
I stripped down at the top of the stairs, and my mother brought me a towel, which I wrapped around my waist. Fisher was in the living room on the couch. When I walked in, she wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and I could tell that she’d been crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t even—” She sighed. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just got so mad. I have stuff on that phone that I wanted to save, and now it’s gone. I didn’t back it up. I’m such an idiot. I’m sorry. Please don’t tell Mom. Please don’t tell her, okay?”
I put up my hand: Enough.
“I understand,” I said. “I get it.”
She looked up hopefully. “So you won’t tell her?”
I wouldn’t tell, I said. It was between us.
My mother brought us both iced sweet teas.
“Where are your clothes?” Fisher asked me.
My mother rushed upstairs to bring me one of my father’s shirts and a pair of pants, which were far too large for me. A few minutes later the ambulance arrived.
The hypnotherapist brought me a glass of water and some roasted almonds in a little yellow bowl shaped like a flat elephant. I was sitting on a small sofa in her office. She worked out of a suite in a partitioned house close to downtown. The other businesses in the house, according to the sign out front, included an acupuncturist, a healing touch practitioner, and a marriage counselor.
Her name was Lisa Vaselli. She was a wide-bottomed woman with a kind, doughy face. She explained the process of hypnotherapy to me. She had a note from Dr. Westervelt and so she was well versed in my medical history. Still, she had questions for me. She asked me how much caffeine I consumed on a daily basis. She asked me if I sometimes woke up short of breath. She asked me if my stomach was ever tied up in knots. If I fidgeted. If I routinely experienced restlessness. Boredom. Did my throat feel lumpy sometimes? Could I swallow? Did I have trouble concentrating or focusing?
“No,” I said. “None of that. It’s more general. Everything I see, it feels so foreign to me. Not altogether foreign, mind you. Just vaguely foreign. Vaguely unsettling, too. Unreal. Or no, that’s not quite it. It’s an abundance of real. Layers of reality, stacked upon each other, that cancel each other out. Like the holograms, I guess.”
“Ah, the Grammers, yes.”
“Don’t you ever feel like they’re part of a separate world that has somehow overlapped with ours? In their world, they’re the real ones, and we’re the holograms. The two universes are slowly merging. They might become more and more real as time goes on, meaning, possibly, we might become less.”
“It’s funny,” she said.
“What is?”
“Oh, well, I was having a lovely conversation with the scheduler yesterday at the dentist’s office. We’d been talking for maybe five minutes before I realized she was a Grammer.”
“Are you familiar with daisy theory? It’s this idea in physics that not everything exists equally or uniformly. For instance, there’s a chance you could exist a little bit more than me. Or me more than you.”
“Daisy theory? No, I’m not familiar with that one.”
I drank some of my water, swished it around in my mouth, let it collide pleasantly with my cheeks and tongue.
“So,” she said, “you’re feeling unsettled then. And Dr. Westervelt says your father died recently?”
I nodded.
“What were the circumstances? Was it sudden or . . . ?”
Over the last few months, the story of my father’s death had become something I could recite, when necessary, with as little emotion as possible. A simple sequence of events. A montage. Almost like a poem for its brevity and reliance on a few crucial images. The bathroom floor. The pasted toothbrush. The body sprawled, half-naked. Tooth chipped on the edge of the sink. A stroke.
Bathroom, toothbrush, body, broken tooth, stroke.
Bath. Brush. Body. Tooth. Stroke.
Bath. Brush. Body. Tooth. Stroke.
“But,” I told her, “this predates all that. It’s been going on for a while. I lose my breath and feel dizzy. I’ve passed out in people’s houses. It’s embarrassing.” I had my legs crossed and my right foot, I realized, was shaking. “I died once. Cardiac arrest. Does Dr. Westervelt’s note mention that?”
“It does, yes. That must have been terribly traumatic.”
“I think about it all the time. I was here and then I wasn’t. It was like taking a dreamless nap. God didn’t show himself to me. No feelings of ecstasy. No paradise. And I do not find this idea peaceful. Some do. There are message boards for people like me, and some people who see nothing, like me, they feel relieved. They say, Well, at least I won’t know to miss my life. I find zero comfort in that. Because right now, I can feel myself sliding toward it. I feel like we’re all marching toward the edge of a cliff. It’s beautiful, sure, from a distance, but once your feet are at the edge, it’s just a giant freaking hole.”
“I understand. As has been said before, all anxiety is an expression of the ur-anxiety.”
“Death.”
She nodded sagely. “You’re not alone. We all struggle with it, to varying degrees.”
“What do you think happens when we die? If you don’t mind me asking. What’s your position on the afterlife?”
She leaned forward. “Jim, have you considered the possibility that you simply don’t remember what happened to you while you were dead? Maybe you visited heaven and saw amazing things but you’ve blocked it out. You don’t remember your dreams every night, do you? And yet we’re told we dream every single night.”
I thought about this for a moment. Why would I have forgotten something so significant? I couldn’t fathom it.
“These attacks,” she said, “they sound to me like echoes of your cardiac arrest. Your body, for whatever reason, might be reenacting its near-death. What I’d like to do is help you find a way to stay relaxed in these situations. To get control of your anxiety.”
She opened the top drawer in a little table by her chair and removed a small black fob not much bigger than a matchbook. She squeezed it, and it began to emit a small clicking noise. Like a Ping-Pong ball being paddled back and forth across a table. She told me to make myself comfortable. I sat back with my head against the couch and listened to the noise. She asked me to count to twenty. With each number, she instructed, I was to imagine taking another step toward the ocean.
By the time I reached twenty, I was standing in the water. The waves slid warmly around my feet. Dimly I was aware that Lisa Vaselli, the woman with the wide bottom and the bag of almonds in her filing cabinet, was out there, nearby, and that she was the one telling me to experience the water as warm, that she was the one determining this sacred, blissful reality. What I mean is, I wasn’t entirely on the beach. I was aware of also being on the couch. At her request, I sat down in the sand, cross-legged, and began a series of simple breathing exercises.
Then, suddenly, I was yanked back into my body. I fluttered open my eyes. Lisa was hunched forward in her chair, looking at me with a look of concern, her brow furrowed, face pale. She asked me if I was okay.
“Yes, fine, why?”
“You were just telling me that you were trapped on a set of stairs.”
“I was?”
“You said you were on some stairs, and you couldn’t get off them.”
I didn’t understand. I only remembered the beach with the warm water.
“Who is Dr. Zinker?” she asked me.
I didn’t say anything. How did she know that name?
“You were calling out for someone named Dr. Zinker. Does that mean anything to you? You seemed very distressed, very upset.”
At that moment I didn’t feel distressed at all. I actually felt somewhat relaxed.
“This doesn’t mean hypnotherapy won’t work for you,” she said.
It hadn’t occurred to me that it wouldn’t.
“Sometimes, in hypnosis, we can fall into the deep end of the subconscious mind, and it can be a little overwhelming. We’ll try again next time.”
We talked for a few more minutes about some breathing exercises I might try at home before going to sleep at night and then I scheduled another appointment for the following month, which I didn’t keep.
Since my father’s death, I’d often thought about the message we’d proposed sending each other from beyond. The proof is in the pudding, he’d suggested. Or, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” We’d never really settled on an exact message, but that didn’t keep me from searching for one. After waking each morning, I’d lie in bed and try to recall what I could of my dreams. Out of a shower, I’d be sure to check the mirror and imagine words writing themselves across the steamy mirror. At a stoplight, I’d turn the radio to an out-of-tune station and listen to see if that loose noise might calcify into recognizable words. I confess I even bought a tape recorder, though I could never quite bring myself to leave it recording in the bathroom where he’d died.
To have undergone hypnosis and been lured, somehow, into a vision of a stairwell—a vision so similar to the one my father had described—what was I to make of that? I hadn’t received any messages in this vision, none that I remembered anyway. If the hypnotherapist was correct, my own mind—my subconscious mind—had produced the staircase in the same fashion it crafted my dreams each night, from the slurry of my day-to-day experience, and if that was so, then nothing paranormal or truly strange had occurred. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my father had been trying to reach me while I’d been in the trance and that I needed to listen.
I’d been calling out for someone, the therapist had said.
For Sally Zinker, of all people.
Did my father want me to find the physicist? Was it through her machine that he would relay his message to me? It was a possibility, however unlikely, that I couldn’t discount.
I found Zinker’s book on Annie’s nightstand and opened it for the first time since the funeral. In the chapter on the machine, I saw that Annie had underlined entire paragraphs:
A spectrum of specters, let’s call it. While we tend to hover at the far end of the existence spectrum, perhaps these apparitions and phantoms lurk at its opposite end. They are here—but almost imperceptibly so. They have, through sheer force of will, reclaimed a sliver of materiality.
And then, on another page:
In as few as ten years, conversing with those who have departed the material plane could become as commonplace as face-lifts, and in this analogy lies an important point: To attempt these communications will be a physically demanding process, one that many will not elect to attempt. Why will the process be so arduous? Because the secret of its success will lie in not-so-subtle subatomic manipulations. Such a machine will have the power to talk to your dead loved ones, yes, but it will, necessarily, change you.
A few sentences later:
It would, as a matter of fact, make you cease to exist—temporarily.
I knew that Annie had been reading the book with interest—we talked about some of the ideas from time to time—but I was still surprised to find these notations.
I called Sally Zinker’s department at UNC, but she was no longer on the faculty there. One of her former colleagues informed me that she had opted for an early retirement and moved back home to Arkansas. Where in Arkansas exactly, this colleague wasn’t sure, as they were no longer in touch.
Sally had authored a few papers in her career, most of which concerned the daisy particle and most of which were behind a paywall online, but they’d all been written before the publication of her book and so I wasn’t sure they’d be of much help to me anyway. I didn’t want to understand the mechanisms of the daisy particle, after all. I didn’t want a physics lesson.
When I wrote an email to Sally’s university address, it bounced back immediately, though this was hardly a surprise since she no longer worked there. I read a couple of reviews of The Reunion Machine. One such review, by another physicist, said the book was an embarrassing misstep and had no real scientific foundation. He said it was a shame that someone like Dr. Zinker, who had contributed so much to our understanding of daisy theory, had tarnished her reputation with a bunch of New Age paranormal mumbo jumbo.
I searched Sally Zinker + Arkansas, but it turned up no address or phone number. Most searches of her name led me to various message boards dedicated to physics and/or paranormal research. She had a number of devotees, it seemed, though she had just as many detractors. On one website, I found a commenter who claimed to know her personally. He reported that following the publication of her book, Sally had stepped down from teaching and thrown herself fully into the project of using the daisy particle to talk with the dead. She’d set up her own lab in Little Rock, he said, and she was closer than ever to making contact with disincarnate spirits using a device of her own design. The comment was two years old, but I replied to it anyway and asked the commenter if he had any contact information for the physicist that he could share with me, on- or offline.
Sorry bro, he wrote soon thereafter. Can’t help you there.
A few days later, Annie and I were out walking through the neighborhood after dinner. We huffed our way to the top of the hill where the road ended abruptly and gave way to dense mountain forest. Poplars, oaks, locusts. Fallen pine trees, moldering, were creeping with life. Mountain laurel and ferns sprouted up in the dark-soiled banks. All was lush, wet. It had been raining earlier.
Through the trees we could see an immense blue-gray rock, the size of two cars. Such an outcropping couldn’t have gone unnoticed by the Shawnee. The Buzzard People—maybe they’d used this rock in some fashion. Maybe this was where they’d brought the bones for the birds to pick clean. It seemed plausible to me.
We were on our way back down the hill when I told Annie that I’d been trying to find Sally Zinker. I didn’t mention my session with the hypnotherapist since doing so would have required that I explain my anxiety attacks. I didn’t want her worrying about me.
“I’ve called UNC, and I’ve been digging around online, too,” I said. “She’s in Arkansas, but that’s all I know so far.”
“Well, don’t even bother trying her publisher.” She smiled coyly. “I tried finding her, too, a couple of months ago. Just before your father died. Her publisher said they couldn’t give out information like that.”
We were nearing the house now.
“Why were you looking for her?”
“Same reason as you, I’m sure,” she said. “I mean, can you even imagine? Talking with the dead?”
I didn’t say anything. She wanted to talk with the dead. Meaning, Anthony. Strangely, until now, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been interested in Zinker’s research for this specific reason. I imagined a package arriving in the mail: a small white futuristic telephone that would allow us to dial up anyone we wished, dead or alive. The idea was incredibly exciting—but also unnerving. Did I really want Annie having regular conversations with her dead husband? As if sensing my sudden unease, she looped her arm through mine as we went in through the back door.
Driving to work I noticed that the Biz
by Group For Lease sign had been removed from the restaurant’s window. Two white trucks were parked along the street, and a man in a sleeveless WWE T-shirt was on a tall ladder painting the balustrades. A few days after that a new sign appeared over the door. SparkBurger, it said. A fancy gourmet burger joint. The night they opened, Annie and I agreed to meet Wes and his new girlfriend there for dinner.
Wes was in the middle of a bad divorce. His wife had left him for another man. Another congregant at The Church of Search, actually. The affair had stirred up a minor controversy in the congregation because both Wes and Harriet were still attending services. Neither one of them had wanted to give it up. What was needed was some sort of church custody agreement, Annie joked.
Harriet’s new guy was a sad-eyed, gray-haired gentleman who spoke with a slight lisp. He was incredibly wealthy, or so it was rumored, and had spent the last three years in near-isolation on a yacht in the Bermuda Triangle.
Annie was friends with Harriet, and it was through that friendship that we’d received some interesting intel about this mysterious man, whose name was Cooper: He was divorced with no children; he and Harriet were already thinking about moving in together; he’d once won twenty grand off Michael Jordan in a poker game; he was into Tantric sex, like Sting, but he rarely lasted more than eight or nine minutes, though Harriet—and this part really creeped me out—had never seen any evidence of actual ejaculate, meaning, possibly, that Cooper was jizzing bursts of hot air inside her.
Oh, the things we know about people we barely know.
Annie hadn’t wanted to eat dinner with Wes. She saw it as a mild betrayal of her friendship with Harriet to be social with the enemy—and they really had become that to each other, enemies. But Harriet was the one who’d cheated, I pointed out, and so why did we need to remain loyal to her? By cheating, hadn’t she given up the right to an exclusive friendship with any of their formerly mutual friends? The injured party in this equation was Wes, surely, and I didn’t think it was wrong to feel worse for him than for her. Annie scoffed at that because who was to say who wronged who first. The cheating, she said, was just the latest in what had surely been a long chain of mutual offenses. Wes hadn’t cheated, perhaps, at least not in the sexual sense, but maybe he’d been distant, cool. Maybe he’d retreated in some crucial way.
The Afterlives Page 19