“Entrez vous,” he said.
His hands were chalky with plaster. He was short with a skeletal face and deep-set eyes that flicked this way and that in their sockets. He was chewing gum and with each clinch of his jaw his face clicked and bounced, as if he had twice the ordinary number of ligaments beneath his skin. His studio was very small. In the far corner, under a steel-gridded window, was a single mattress. He had a long table against one wall that was full of sculpting tools. He led us over to a small table in his kitchen. Two chairs were at the table, arranged opposite one another but slightly askance. Claude motioned for me to sit down in one of the chairs. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so uncomfortable. When he asked me who or what I was looking for, I almost stood up to go.
“Listen, this doesn’t have to be a big deal,” he said. “In fact, it’s really simple. I get out my paper and pen, and then we wait to see what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it’s half.”
“Half?”
“Half price.”
“Oh, Kitra didn’t mention—”
“Thousand dollars.”
“Just to—”
“That’s right. But if that’s too steep for you, tell me now. I’m in the middle of a project, and I’m meeting someone for dinner tonight.”
“Does it usually work?”
He thought about this for a moment. “Seven times out of ten. Something like that. I don’t keep a record.”
“But if it doesn’t work, I still owe you five hundred?”
He nodded. I opened my wallet. I didn’t have that kind of cash. I hadn’t come prepared. Seeing this, he mentioned an ATM down the block I could use. Since I was Kitra’s friend, he said he trusted that I’d pay him afterward. We could proceed.
“So the dead speak through you?” I asked. “Or through your pen?”
“I have a guide. Her name is Angelique. She’s the one speaking with the dead and directing my pen.”
“And who is Angelique?”
“That’s not really important.”
“What is it the dead usually say?”
“They say whatever they want.”
“But—”
“The dead don’t know anything you don’t know,” he said, crossing his arms. “You shouldn’t expect to learn any grand secrets of the universe.”
He brought out a large sheet of paper, like something you’d wrap steaks in, almost as big as the tabletop itself, and then clicked his pen. Placing the nib of the pen near the top left corner of the paper, he closed his eyes and began to hum. A single low note. A droning noise. Then he trailed away into silence.
“I need you to hold the person in your mind,” he said. “You don’t need to say the name out loud, though you can if you wish. Focus is the main thing.”
I closed my eyes and thought about my father. His face. His white goatee. His brawny arms. I pictured him as he’d once been, a hulk in the halls of the middle school. I saw him as he was at the end, sprawled on the bathroom floor, the towel around his waist, his tooth chipped. I saw him ahead of me on a hiking trail. I saw him on the stairs of the restaurant, his back to the wall, waiting, waiting.
I peeked open my eyes. Claude’s pen was dancing slowly and lightly across the paper. It reminded me of the needle on a cardiograph machine. His eyes were squinched shut, and his head snapped forward as if he were dodging a bird that had just swooped down at him.
Claude’s eyes popped open. He put the pen down on the table. The paper was a scribbled mess. Line after line of gibberish.
“Sheet music for the dead,” he said.
I stood up and moved to his side of the table so that I could study it more closely. My father’s message—was it there?
“Is this English?” I asked.
Claude picked up his pen again, studied the paper for a moment, and circled a series of numbers near the bottom of the page. I hadn’t recognized them as numbers until he did this.
“An address or . . . a telephone number?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” he said. “Yeah, maybe so. Ten digits.”
“Has that ever happened before? Has Angelique ever given you a telephone number?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so. That’s new. Usually it says something like, With you.”
He folded up the paper and handed it to me. He said it was mine to do with as I pleased—to decode or discard.
Now, as for the money.
“So, five hundred then?” I asked.
“Thousand,” he said. “That’s a message.”
“Are we sure about that?” I asked.
“Very. Anything that isn’t nonsense is a message.”
I went downstairs and walked down the block to the ATM. Claude was waiting for me at the front entrance with my roller suitcase when I returned. When I gave him the cash, he counted it, nodded, and then slid the bills into his pocket.
I caught a cab to the airport. Sitting at my gate, an hour later, I unfolded the paper and stared at the sequence of numbers buried in the storm cloud of his scribbles. The first three numbers were 5-0-1. I looked them up on my phone.
The area code for Little Rock, Arkansas.
Was it possible that my father was helping me to find Sally Zinker, was pointing me toward her? I hadn’t mentioned Sally Zinker or Little Rock to the psychic, and I highly doubted Kitra had contacted him after our lunch and told him anything about me. It was inexplicable.
My plane was boarding. I dialed the number as I gathered my things and got in line.
A robotic voice mail answered.
“Please state your name,” it said, “your contact information, and who you’re trying to reach.”
“My name is Jim Byrd,” I said, “and I’m wondering if this is the number for a physicist named Sally Zinker.”
Three Wendell Lennox films arrived in the mail. I’d ordered them from a vendor in Minneapolis the same week my father died—the day after our trip to the graveyard, in fact—and my intention had been for us to watch them together. They’d been on back order; hence the shipping delay.
Wendell Lennox had his own Wikipedia page. Not only had he been a screenwriter, but he’d also been blacklisted. Well, not blacklisted actually, but gray-listed. He’d shared a name with a union organizer in Ohio who’d given a couple of quotes to the papers and who, consequently, had had to testify in front of the House Committee. Because of this name confusion, the studios had avoided Wendell’s work for a couple of years. He’d moved to Mexico City for a while and stayed afloat selling B-movie horror scripts, one of which, The Skeleton Man (El Hombre Esqueleto), was a surprise hit and spawned a handful of sequels: Revenge of the Skeleton Man, Son of Skeleton Man, and so on. Despite his success in Mexico, Wendell’s career in Hollywood never really recovered. It seemed he was mostly remembered today for the Skeleton Man movies, though he’d also written a number of dramas in the early forties—mostly concerning romantic entanglements, love triangles, and ill-fated affairs.
Most important of all, Wendell Lennox was Robert Lennox’s brother. This was easy enough to determine, thanks to a genealogy chart published online by a distant relative. I’d even found an interview Wendell had given to a magazine, now defunct, in 1977, the same year he died. Briefly, in this piece, he referred to his childhood home in Shula, North Carolina.
“I was a good kid, mostly,” he said. “I didn’t get into much trouble. I was a little spacey. Very much in my head. My father owned a furniture store, and so I was there most days after school. He was a good man, very hardworking, and I think I got that from him. I’m a very hard worker. But I was obsessed with the movies, you know, and I left the very first chance I got and came out here to California. Selling sofas, I didn’t have that in me. That wasn’t what I wanted for my life.”
No mention of the fire, no mention o
f his brother’s death—what to make of that? Probably nothing. Unless prompted specifically to comment on it by an interviewer, I couldn’t imagine anyone bringing up such a traumatic event for a magazine article.
The films that arrived in the mail weren’t his Mexican horror films but a couple of the romantic dramas from the forties. I held up each case for Annie and asked her to pick. The DVD cases had no artwork, only white paper with the film titles printed in black.
The Woman on the Bridge, one was called.
Busy Beware.
A Ring for April.
She chose this last one. I dropped it in the player and then settled down on the couch beside her.
Fisher wandered into the room during the opening credits and, with a look of disgust, asked us if we were aware that somewhat recent advances in technology had made it possible to watch films in color and, gasp, 3D. Without a word Annie made room for Fisher on the couch.
“Thanks but no thanks,” she said, going upstairs.
We settled in under a blanket. The movie was about two brothers who fall in love with the same dark-haired girl who comes into their father’s jewelry store one afternoon. The girl seems to prefer the younger brother, the impetuous one, but her parents—practical, hard-up people—push her into the arms of the older one, who seems a safer bet because he plans to stay in town and take over his family’s jewelry business one day. The younger brother, heartbroken, travels the world as an importer of fabrics, living for many years in Marrakesh as the paramour of an oil heiress, his life a bottomless buffet of sensual delights, none of which are able, ultimately, to help him forget the sting of that first rejection. It is only after he learns that the girl—who, as it happens, has been unhappy in her marriage all these years—has fallen over a garden wall and been impaled by a fence railing that he journeys home to see her again. Their reunion, sadly, is a brief one as the girl, April, will not survive her injury, but she presses her wedding ring into his hand, telling him to keep it as a symbol of her love for him.
The final scene was a tad maudlin, but it was hard to not feel moved by their last-minute declarations of love. It’s never too late, was the message. A cliché, obviously, but one that might be true. When I looked up at Annie she was blinking away the tears.
“‘Three minutes with you is better than a lifetime without,’” I said, quoting the film.
“‘Let’s make them count,’” she quoted back to me with a smile.
We wandered upstairs and got ready for bed. We kissed goodnight and flipped off the lights. In the darkness, I replayed Wendell’s movie in my head. Were the brothers stand-ins for Wendell and Robert Lennox? It seemed entirely possible. And if they were, did that mean that the young girl in the jewelry shop was Clara? This was an interesting new angle to consider, the cinematic resonance of her death.
“I went to see a psychic,” I said. “While I was in New York.”
She snorted. “Really? I can’t picture you with a psychic.”
“Me either. But I did it.”
“What happened?”
“Mostly I just felt like an idiot for being there.”
She put her hand on my chest.
“What would you say to Anthony?” I asked. “If you could talk to him?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’d want to make sure he was at peace.”
My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness. I reached out and ran my fingers across her face. Her eyes were closed.
“I want you to talk to him,” I said. “I think you should.”
“Good.”
“I can’t even imagine what that must have been like, when he died. Never do that to me, please. I couldn’t bear it.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
“It doesn’t bother you that I want to talk to him?” she asked.
“Should it?”
“Jim.”
“Should it?”
Her hand was on my scar now. My chest pocket.
“No, it shouldn’t bother you,” she said.
“But you do still love him, right? I mean, how could you not?”
“I can hear your brain working right now. All the little gears, I can hear them turning. This isn’t a competition, and I hope you don’t think of it that way. I love Anthony and I love you, too. It’s not one or the other, and one doesn’t diminish the other. Love isn’t a natural resource. You don’t run out.”
“An unnatural resource, then. I saw that crocheted somewhere once. A toilet seat doily, I think.”
She breathed out a laugh. I didn’t feel very reassured. I wasn’t even sure she was right. In the audience of her heart a front-row seat was forever reserved for a person who was never going to arrive. As I saw it, all those seats belonged to me and Fisher now.
I got out of bed and went over to the closet. I pulled the little black cube from my sock drawer and brought it back to bed. Annie, eyeing it suspiciously, asked me what it was. I’d never shown it to her before now, and so I explained my trip to the hologram recording shop. When I placed the cube in her hand, she felt its weight and turned it over a few times before pressing Play. My father lurched into view at the foot of the bed, towering over us. He looked just as he had the first time I’d watched this—and the second and third and fourth time, too. His bunched-up shirt sleeve. His twisted belt buckle. The little curled white hairs in his goatee. His long, serious stare. He didn’t glow or shine. He appeared as any person might in the semi-darkness—dim, wreathed in shadows. When he began to dance, Annie sat up in bed, putting more space between her and it.
“Well, that’s it, I guess,” my father said, like always, and disappeared.
Annie was very quiet for a moment.
“So was that being projected from the cube, or . . . ?”
“I’m actually not sure how it works. I can’t figure it out.”
She sighed. “Please don’t ever make one of these. If you die before me, I do not want to find one of these in a sock drawer or a safe-deposit box.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me you won’t. You haven’t already, have you?”
“I haven’t,” I said. “And yes, I promise. But why?”
“Sit up here in the dark by myself, miserable, and watch you do a little happy dance over and over again? No thank you.”
“I wouldn’t have to dance. I could try and say something meaningful.”
“Even worse.”
I stowed the cube away in my sock drawer again and climbed into bed again beside her, my chest a few inches from her back.
“It’s bad enough without holograms, trust me,” she said. “I used to get these little flashes. The chair in the living room, the blue one with the flower print, he used to sit in that chair and read Bill Bryson. I say that like he was always reading Bill Bryson. He wasn’t. Actually that may have only happened once, but when I used to look at the chair, I’d see him sitting there just like that. There and then gone. Very fast.”
“You talked about getting rid of that chair last year.”
She was quiet for a moment. “There’s a little red stain on the right arm.”
“The splotch, yes.”
“Red wine. From Anthony. I have a very distinct memory of him spilling that wine. I was so mad. I’d just had the chair reupholstered. He thought it was funny. I could have killed him.” She sighed. “It’s not like he’s haunting that chair. It’s more like I am. I’m haunting him into it. Does that even make sense?”
I wriggled closer toward her in the darkness so that our legs touched.
“There’s an old Irish proverb,” I said. “The barrier between heaven and earth is thinnest after someone close to you dies.”
“This is still very new, very fresh.”
It took me a moment to realize she meant my father and not Anthony.
“If he hadn
’t died—Anthony, I mean—I wouldn’t have you.”
She was quiet.
“I probably shouldn’t admit that,” I said, “but I do think it sometimes. It makes it difficult for me to really mourn him.”
“I don’t expect you to mourn him. You didn’t know him.”
“It’s strange but a small part of me was sort of relieved when Mom called about Dad. I had this very brief moment where I thought, Okay, so now at least we know how it ends for him, how it happens. That was comforting. It was always hanging out there, this inevitable, terrible thing, and then once it was real, it was like I could finally start dealing with it. A stroke on the bathroom floor. That was always how the story was going to end, only none of us knew it yet.”
“Anthony was always going to drown in a river.”
“One day it will be you—or me. Probably me first. My heart—odds are that’s the end of my story.”
She flipped over to face me. “It’s not something I like to think about. Besides, you have your thingy.” She patted my chest.
I folded my head toward her neck. My lips met her clavicle. I kissed her throat. Slowly we shimmied out of our underwear and began to make love quietly. It was noiseless, dreamy sex, hot-skinned, very languid and slow, otherworldly. Later, I woke up, and our bodies were still pressed together, one of her legs underneath me. She was awake, I realized then. I’d probably only been dozing for a few minutes. I let her go, and she slipped away to the bathroom. I heard the sink run. The hum of her electric toothbrush. The squeaky slap of the medicine cabinet door. I don’t remember her coming back to bed before I drifted off again.
I was leaving the bank when I saw Wilson Bizby, King of the White Hairs, getting out of his Lexus across the street. I went over to him and shook his hand.
“SparkBurger,” I said. “We ate there a couple of weeks ago. Not bad at all.”
“Good, good, I’m glad to hear it.”
The Afterlives Page 21