Analyzing the dissolution of other marriages was a way, I suppose, of avoiding a similar fate. A preventative—like taking antacids before a big meal. If we could just understand what had happened to Wes and Harriet—or to any of the others—then surely we’d be able to sidestep any future troubles of our own. Always, it seemed, a lesson could be drawn: Don’t stop talking in the tough times, or An emotional connection to a person outside the marriage could be just as detrimental as a sexual one. Annie and I had been married for almost two years at this point, and though I didn’t feel our relationship was in any sort of distress, we did bicker more than we used to, and I’ll admit that a few of the personality quirks that I’d found cute or endearing in the early days—her sulkiness when she didn’t get her way, for instance, or her inability to hide her disdain and impatience for people, such as my mother, people who “didn’t have a clue”—sometimes irked me enough to cut off a conversation and go for a short walk down the street. But I think generally we were still a happy couple. We fought, yes, but we always made up again.
Annie only agreed to the dinner with Wes on the condition that we make plans with Harriet and Cooper within the week. Fine, I’d said, fine, fine, whatever she wanted.
We arrived first. We hadn’t been there together since our first date. The restaurant’s decor was different. The walls had been chipped at, purposefully distressed, to reveal brickwork patches beneath the chalky plaster. Giant abstract paintings—like violent tie-dye—hung over each booth. Then Wes showed up, finally, with his new girlfriend. Annie and I were flabbergasted: his new girlfriend was none other than Sudeepa Hardy, from the church.
“I asked him not to tell you,” Sudeepa said. “I was afraid you’d back out of dinner otherwise.”
“I didn’t even know you and your husband had . . .” Annie said.
“He actually moved out three months ago. We’ve been very discreet about it.”
“Until now of course,” Wes said, smiling. “This is actually the first time we’ve ever had dinner with another couple. You’re our first! Aren’t you honored?”
“Wes and I were both going through a rough time,” Sudeepa said to Annie, as if trying to convince her that nothing truly indecent had occurred, that this made a certain rational sense.
“Yes, of course,” Annie said. “It’s good to have a shoulder—and all that.”
“Harriet knows Sudeepa and I are seeing each other, by the way,” Wes said, also to Annie. “This isn’t some big secret you’ll have to keep from her.”
The waiter arrived. Annie buried her face in the menu and asked for a Diet Coke instead of white wine like the rest of us. Whenever Wes would compliment Sudeepa or look at her in a certain way—with longing, I suppose—Annie’s foot would nudge mine under the table, and I’d feel her eyes on me. She’d never really liked Wes, even before the divorce. He could be a know-it-all, definitely. A tad smug.
We consulted our menus. The burgers were fancy and expensive. Organic, grass-fed, hugged daily. Goat cheese and sprouts. Roasted red peppers, basil pesto, and arugula.
“So,” I said to Sudeepa after the waiter took our order, “how are the kids handling it?”
“They’re fine, for the most part. My husband’s actually renting the house across the street, and he comes over for breakfast every morning. We’re trying to keep it as smooth as possible.”
“That can’t be easy,” I said.
“We just have to respect each other’s space.”
By the time the burgers arrived five minutes later—small patties on whole wheat buns ringed with giant potato wedges—the conversation had begun to sputter. We each chewed quietly for a few minutes.
“Annie and I read a very interesting book recently,” I said, hoping to rescue the night from disaster. “By a physicist named Sally Zinker. That name might ring a bell.”
“Zinker,” Wes said, eyes narrowing. “She spoke at Search last year, right? She’s the one who thinks we can talk with the dead. The lady was a bit of a crank, no? Your dad and I talked about her a couple of times.” He smiled. “I tell you what, Jim, I sure miss talking with your dad. He had such a great mind. If it hadn’t been so sudden, I would have tried to make arrangements for him with that cryo-brain company out in Phoenix. They have to get to you fast though. Within fifteen to twenty minutes of death.”
“Cryo-brain?” I asked.
“They keep your brain in cold storage. Until the day comes when they can upload it to a computer and bring you back to life.”
“Store you on a hard drive and turn you into a hologram,” Annie said, goading him.
“One day, maybe, sure.”
Wes’s faith in technology’s power to save us was astounding to me, but then again, he was so full of hope and confidence about the future that a part of me really envied him. He didn’t need God or the afterlife, not when he had accelerators and scanners. Maybe he was right. Technology—the very thing that had chilled us to the mysteries of the universe—possibly was all that remained to unthaw us again. Our intuition had been so thoroughly squelched, our spiritual faith so deteriorated, that we somehow found it easier to believe the universe had started in a computer rather than a garden.
I excused myself from the table. I stopped by the bar where a woman in a tight black T-shirt was shoveling ice into cups. I tapped the bar to get her attention.
“This restaurant used to be something else,” I said. “Any chance you know what happened to the previous owner?”
“No idea, dude.”
I nodded. “Are there tables upstairs, too?”
“Upstairs?”
“Is there another dining area?”
“I think it’s just storage or something up there, I don’t know, I’ve never been.”
“You’ve never been upstairs?”
“Nope.”
I stepped into the back hallway. A guy was waiting outside the men’s room, reading an article on his phone, so I slid past him and continued down the hall.
But there was a problem: Where the stairs had been was now a white wall, and at the center of the wall was a white closet-sized door. It was padlocked at the top. I jiggled the knob and shoved my shoulder against the door, lightly. No light shone under the door. I tried to peer through the crack but all was dark on the other side. They’d sealed it off completely.
When I turned, Annie was there.
“I thought I’d find you hiding back here. You can’t leave me with those two, it’s not fair. This is your dinner, you set it up.”
“Look what they’ve done, they’ve sealed off the stairs.”
As if to disprove me, she came over and jiggled the doorknob as I had. Then she looked up at the padlock in the top left corner.
“Did you know about Sudeepa and Wes? Be honest.”
“I really didn’t. It’s not like Wes and I talk much.”
She reached up and shook the padlock. “She looks better, doesn’t she? Did you notice that?”
“Sudeepa?”
“She’s lost some weight. Her hair’s different, too.” She knocked on the door. “Lost cause, I think.”
We gave up on the stairs and returned to the table. Wes and Sudeepa were talking quietly with each other. Seeing us, they both sat up straighter, like teenagers who’d been caught making out.
A week or so after our dinner, I flew up to New York for a college friend’s bachelor party. The organizer of this outing had us bar-hopping after each round of drinks, and so we wasted most of the evening walking and locating tables at each successive venue. I didn’t get back to my hotel until almost three a.m. and slept horribly. Around dawn I woke up from a dream. The dream had been about my father, that much I knew, but I could remember very little else about it. We’d been at a table. In a room. Not a room I recognized. Just a room. With a window and a door. If he’d said anything to me, I couldn’t remember
now.
I drank a few glasses of water from the tap and fell back asleep. My phone vibrating on the nightstand was what woke me up again, close to noon. My skull felt scraped out, brittle as old Tupperware. I had a text from Annie: Crazy Ben wrote a play about talking turds who fall in love just before getting flushed.
Crazy Ben was one of the inmates at the prison where Annie ran her playwriting workshops. He was in jail for the attempted murder of his wife, and according to Annie the man was uglier than a cracked mop bucket. “I feel like it’s attempted murder every time he looks at me,” went Annie’s joke. In a class of ten inmates, however, it was Crazy Ben who’d revealed himself as the most promising playwright. Week after week he’d astounded Annie with his elaborate and thoughtful premises, with his sharp dialogue and creativity. She was even thinking about staging a Crazy Ben play at Thrill Arts! as a way of raising money for the program.
Turds need love, too, I wrote back to her.
I jumped in the shower and then flipped on the television to watch the news while I dressed. Is Your Heart Device Going to Kill You? it said along the bottom of the screen. I turned up the volume. The silver-haired host was talking to a HeartNet representative with an aggravated tone. I quickly gathered that there’d been another heart hacking victim, a woman in Oklahoma who’d been found at the end of her driveway in her bathrobe. A hacker in Russia—identity unknown at present—had one-upped the Chinese teen by breaking through HeartNet-Net’s now enhanced security and exploding a random heart on the other side of the world, again.
“There has to be some accountability,” the anchor said.
“Certainly,” the representative said. “And believe me, there will be accountability. We’ll see to that.”
“And who will be accountable to whom?”
“We will hold the guilty parties accountable! Obviously.”
“Wait, I’m sorry, hold on, wait a minute, are you suggesting that your company isn’t accountable for its own security?”
“I’m not really here to debate who is accountable for what, exactly, or who to whom. That’s not why I’m here tonight. We are making a good faith effort to—”
“Okay, but tell me, what will you be doing for this poor woman’s family?”
“The family, yes, thank you, God bless them. Our thoughts are with them right now. I assure you the family will be well compensated. We’re in the middle of that now.”
“Compensated how, exactly?”
“We’re making that determination as we speak.”
“You’re determining how much this woman’s life was worth, in other words.”
“We want to take care of her family. We’re trying to do the right thing, I assure you.”
“And will there be other victims? What are you doing to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else? What assurances can you offer all those people who have a HeartNet device in their chests right now, who are watching this and fearing for their lives?”
“Believe me, we’re working around the clock on this issue. It’s important to us that we fix this. It’s very, very important to us.”
I turned off the television and left the hotel. My flight home wasn’t until later that evening, and at Annie’s urging, I’d made lunch plans with her brother, Kurt. I walked all the way to Chinatown to meet him at his favorite Cantonese restaurant. He was already there when I arrived. Alongside him was his girlfriend, Kitra. I’d never met her before now. She was a pale waif, red-haired, and as far as I could tell, her entire lunch consisted of a single veggie dumpling. “You can control your appetite with your mind,” she explained. “I’ve been doing it for so long I’m hardly ever hungry anymore. I have almost no appetite at all.”
“It’s true,” Kurt said proudly. “You’d be amazed. She eats half a piece of toast every morning and then she rides her bike two miles to her restaurant.”
“Plus my vitamins,” she said.
“Yeah, she eats vitamins, too.”
“I don’t eat them,” she said, grossed out, embarrassed. “I swallow them.”
“So if I only swallow this dumpling,” Kurt said, smiling big at me, “I guess I haven’t eaten then, huh?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said, and turned to me. “He’s such an asshole, isn’t he?”
I shrugged, not wanting to get involved.
“Anyway,” Kurt said, “Kitra and I got married. I called Annie this morning and told her the news.”
“Oh,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“There wasn’t any ceremony,” Kitra said. “And we’ve decided not to wear rings.”
“It’s just a piece of paper, really,” Kurt said.
“I don’t even know why we bothered with it, to be honest,” Kitra said.
Kurt ate another dumpling. He’d put on a little weight since the last time I’d seen him. He was jowlier and his haircut, so short and spiky, accented the largeness of his head. Kitra rummaged around in her purse for her phone. She held it up to me and, without comment, showed me a picture of a horse.
“Yes, we bought a horse,” Kurt said. “He’s on a farm upstate. We’ve been up there a couple of times to see him.”
“I didn’t realize you rode,” I said to Kitra.
“I don’t. You couldn’t pay me to ride a horse. Anyway, he’s very old. He belonged to my friend, and they had to sell him because they were moving to the Philippines. The horse’s name is Tobacco.”
“Kitra was afraid they might put him down otherwise.”
“I see,” I said.
“I don’t care much for the name Tobacco,” Kitra said, “but it’s too late to name him anything else, I think.”
He motioned for the bill and then looked at me with a barely suppressed smile. “Annie tells me you’re in the middle of an investigation. You two are on the hunt for some elusive scientist?”
“Well,” I said, “investigation might be going too far. We read her book, and we’re interested in getting in touch with her but she’s a little tricky to track down.”
“Oooh, I love a good mystery,” Kitra said, without emotion. “All I read are mysteries. If a book doesn’t have a mystery to solve, I won’t touch it.”
I wasn’t sure how much of a mystery this was. Probably Sally Zinker had just retired a little early and moved back home. Probably she just wanted to be left alone.
“But Annie says this lady’s looking for a way to talk with the dead?” Kurt said. “That right?”
Typically Annie wasn’t in the habit of sharing so much with her brother. I offered up a noncommittal nod.
“I’m sure it’s Anthony that Annie wants to talk to,” Kitra said. “God, that funeral. So, so terrible.”
“You were there?” I asked.
“Kurt and I had only been together for—what?” She looked to him. “A couple of months?”
He nodded and stuffed another dumpling in his mouth.
“One of the saddest funerals I’ve ever been to,” she said. “And I’ve been to quite a few, believe me. There must have been three hundred people.”
“He was well liked,” Kurt said. “A very popular guy. Lots of friends. Plus, his family’s well connected down there.”
“And poor Annie. She kept it together during the funeral at least.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “She really did. It was only after that that things got rough enough that Mom and Dad had to move down there for a while and help with Fisher. Rough days, for sure.”
“But if she wants to talk with him,” Kitra said, “why not just try a psychic?”
I must have made a face because Kitra’s voice became very excited and fast. “I happen to have a very good friend who is psychically gifted. He’s not like one of those people you see on television, for God’s sake. He’s legitimate. He put me in touch with my uncle Maury, as a matter of fact.”
&nbs
p; Her uncle Maury, Kurt explained, was the one who’d brought Kitra home from Tunisia after her mother died in the embassy attack, the man who’d raised her as his own. Embassy attack? Tunisia? Somehow I’d missed all this about Kitra and felt like I should have known it. I feigned familiarity with these events, saying something like, Ah, right, knowing I could get the full story from Annie when I was home again.
“He doesn’t hold séances or anything like that,” Kitra said. “What he does is sit down with you at a table with a pen and paper. He asks you to focus on the person you’re trying to reach, and he closes his eyes and the pen writes what it will on the paper.”
“It’s called automatic writing,” Kurt said.
“Well,” I said, trying to be polite, “maybe we could talk to him then?”
Kitra got out her phone. A few seconds later my phone buzzed in my pocket.
“I sent you his contact,” she said. “His name is Claude Wilkes-Weaver. He’s a sculptor, too. We’ve got one of his pieces in our apartment.”
“It’s a nudie,” Kurt said with a smile.
“A nude figure,” Kitra corrected.
“Giant boobs,” Kurt added, demonstrating with his hands.
“A fertility goddess.”
“Which is why it doesn’t come anywhere near the bedroom,” Kurt said, grinning.
The bill arrived. Ten minutes later we were downstairs on the sidewalk. I told them congratulations again and jumped into a cab. I still had about four hours before my flight.
Claude Wilkes-Weaver worked out of a studio in an old brick building near the expressway in Brooklyn. He buzzed me up when I mentioned Kitra’s name over the intercom. The elevator was out of order, and so I had to climb four flights of stairs with my roller suitcase. By the time I reached his floor, I was completely out of breath. He opened the door before I could knock.
The Afterlives Page 20