The Hopsteads don’t have much money. They rent this house, and the nicest thing they own is the sofa they bought on installments from the Lennoxes’ store. Mr. Hopstead came to Shula as a teenager, fleeing his family’s farm, and for many years he worked as a motorman on the streetcars. Now he works at the textile mill, though in what capacity, Wendell does not know.
Mr. Hopstead laughs uneasily and then claps Wendell on the shoulder and says he’ll just come out with it. He’s figured out about the engagement. He knows Wendell intends to marry Clara, and, contrary to what Wendell might think, he supports the idea.
“Granted, Clara is still very young,” he says. “But this doesn’t have to happen tomorrow, does it?”
Wendell says it doesn’t.
The Lennoxes, Mr. Hopstead says, are good and respectable people, and he would be proud to count Wendell as a son-in-law.
Feeling suddenly uneasy, Wendell manages to shake Mr. Hopstead’s outstretched hand, but then, once they have returned to the kitchen and Clara smiles at him, he realizes that she orchestrated this, that she told her father everything in the hope that it would move things along more quickly. With so many people in the kitchen, Wendell can’t ask her why she did this without consulting him first. He hates how damned happy she seems to be. This kitchen reeks of cooking gas and her brothers’ farts. How do they stand it? He can hardly breathe in here, all this commotion, the heat still rising up off the stove. He’s sweating through his shirt. Clara takes his hand, squeezes it, smiles at him again, pulls him into the hall.
“Did you talk to Daddy? Daddy said he was going to talk to you. Did he? What did Daddy say? Tell me everything.”
—
IN THE HOUSE ON GRAHAM STREET, Wendell sips his iced water, gazing up, trying to imagine what Clara’s life might have been like here. She and Robert were married for a full decade. Surely some of those years were good ones. Possibly this could have been his life if he hadn’t left town. Maybe he and Clara could have had children together—little beautiful Clara lookalikes. He could have taken over his father’s store. Perhaps, working together, he and his brother could have saved the business. That Robert kept open its doors as long as he did was a real feat—but still, Wendell might have been able to help think of some off-the-wall solutions. Certainly, if he’d stayed and married her, Clara would be alive today. There wouldn’t have been any fire. He could have protected her from that fate, at least.
Wendell can’t help feeling somewhat culpable for what happened to Clara. He never took it very seriously, their engagement. He was too young then to know that infatuations, however strongly felt, have their expiration dates. But if it was an infatuation, then why does he long for her now? He’d cut off both arms right now if it would bring her back. They never even made love! Is that why he wants her so badly? If only he’d slept with her, just once, maybe she wouldn’t continue to hold such power over him. He should have married her and taken her with him to California!
—
WENDELL AND CLARA—TEENAGERS—EMERGE from a movie at the Grand, blinking in the brightness of the lobby lights. Clara’s neck is streaked red where he’s been kissing and sucking at her skin. God, that skin of hers. She takes his hand, and they shove through the doors, into the night, in the direction of his father’s store, where a sofa awaits them in the darkness of the showroom.
—
“WHAT DID DADDY SAY?” Clara asks. “Tell me everything. Isn’t this so exciting?”
“I thought we’d agreed we’d keep it a secret for now,” Wendell says irritably.
She looks up at him, wounded, about to say something, but then her oldest brother steps into the hallway, looking for his shoes. He finds them at the bottom of the stairs and sits down on the second step to jam his feet inside clumsily. He knows that Wendell and Clara are waiting for him to leave before resuming their conversation, and so he takes an especially long time to tie his laces, looping large, with extra flourishes.
“If you’re going to kiss her, just do it already,” he barks. “Don’t mind me!”
—
HE’S STANDING at the bottom of the stairs, gazing up, picturing her at the top with a little dog under her arm. He should have come back to see her after the fire. He should have visited her in the hospital.
“So you knew someone who lived here?” the woman asks, hand on her hip.
“My brother, actually. Half a century ago.”
“He must have been one of the first to live here,” the woman says. “The house was built in 1918. My husband and I are doing our best to restore it to its original condition. When we bought it, it was three different apartments. We basically had to gut it. What did it look like last time you were here?”
“It’s my first time here, actually.”
“Oh.”
He cups his hand over the post as he turns away from the stairs—but what’s that? A dancing light at the periphery of his vision. A flash of blue and yellow and red, not against the wall, but midair. Like light through a prism. It’s already gone. A trick of the sunlight on a mirror perhaps. Or—of course! His water glass. He twists it in his hand, trying to reproduce the flash against any of the walls.
“What are you doing?” the owner says.
Or is his wristwatch responsible? A glint of the metal, maybe.
“The light, on the stairs,” she says, “It’s funny there, isn’t it?”
“What’s doing it?”
“We don’t know. We can’t figure it out. It’s not just the light either. My daughter, she hears things sometimes. Voices. She says it’s like a telephone wrapped in a blanket under one of the steps. She had a sleepover with a bunch of girls. They stayed up all night just listening and messing around with a Ouija board.”
“Any luck?”
She shakes her head. “No. One of them said she heard a dog barking. But, well, teenage girls, right?”
Wendell smiles and returns the glass to her. He’s no longer sure why he’s come here.
—
SHE’S BEEN DEAD for two years when he visits her grave for the first and only time in his life. He leaves a few flowers on her tombstone. He’s in town for no other reason but this. Is she watching him from up above? That same afternoon, feeling no solace, he takes the bus to New York and gets a room at the St. Regis Hotel. Upon request, room service brings him a typewriter, an Underwood, which Wendell sets up on a fat dictionary at the end of the bed. He has decided to write a script about two brothers who fall in love with the same girl after she enters their father’s furniture store one afternoon—or no, not furniture store. The boys’ father will own a jewelry store, and the girl will choose the older, more stable brother. The younger one, hurt and sad, will run off to Hollywood and become a writer—or no, maybe not a writer. The younger brother could be a traveler instead, a wanderer, a rover, a lost soul. He’ll travel the world in search of absolution. As a spy. No, not a spy. He should be something more believable than that. He’ll import things. Fabrics, maybe.
Wendell takes a short nap and then calls downstairs to the kitchen for a turkey sandwich and some cookies. He unzips his pants, thinking of Clara, but now that he’s been to her grave, he can’t seem to disentangle the image of the girl who lives in his memory—soft-skinned, young, warm, in a light blue dress, latched onto his arm—from the idea of her corpse. Her death has robbed him of a reliable fantasy, too. Imagining her sunken features, her shriveled, worm-eaten innards, he opens his eyes, feeling disgusted with himself for even wanting to fantasize about her. He can’t shake the feeling that in conjuring up her memory for his own gratification he has committed an unforgivable offense. He would apologize—but to whom should he apologize? To God? To her? He sits down at the end of his bed and begins writing again.
—
IN BED WITH THE LETTER from Robert again. That damn letter. Marrying Clara! Wendell wonders how long this has b
een going on. He doesn’t want to know. He hasn’t been in touch with Clara for over a year. The night before he left town he took her on a walk downtown and reassured her they’d be able to stay together. Once he was more established out there and had the means, he’d send for her. He’d sell a few scripts and find them a proper place to live. All of it was very exciting, very romantic, but then nothing ever happened. Neither one of them broke it off, not officially, though it’s true that their letter-writing became less and less feverish. Her parents were having some financial trouble, something she’d never elaborate on, there was that, plus she didn’t seem too interested in his progress selling scripts. She didn’t even really like films. He supposes they simply grew apart. Whatever they had, it fizzled. Eventually he started seeing other women, and the idea of actually bringing her out West seemed increasingly far-fetched.
Still, he’s shocked about this latest news, Clara marrying Robert. To hell with them!
He doesn’t write them immediately, intending to give it some thought, but one month passes and then another and soon his inability to formulate a decent response becomes its own response and solidifies into an attitude that he convinces himself is justified. He enjoys thinking of their marriage as an act of betrayal.
—
THE DAY AFTER he leaves her behind in Shula, his train hisses to a stop just outside Chicago. A few minutes later a fat conductor ambles down the aisle with an explanation for the delay. A car accident on the line a mile ahead. Lean, handsome, hopeful—Wendell eats peanuts in his window seat, bits of fibrous shell falling all over his shirt and lap. He’s eager to be out West as soon as possible, but he has no appointments there. No one is expecting him.
A woman with a green hat over her long blond hair taps him on the shoulder and asks if she might sit beside him. Her other seatmate, she explains, just won’t stop talking. Wendell surreptitiously dusts the shell bits from his chest and makes room for her. By the time the train is moving again, a few hours later, Wendell is quite certain he’s in love with this woman. She has the most beautiful eyes, and when she giggles, she puts her little hand over her mouth. When she asks Wendell if he has a girlfriend, he smiles and says he does not.
—
WENDELL HANDS THE OWNER his glass and peers up the steps one last time. This light—if only it was her. He tries to imagine her descending toward him. If he focused hard enough, could he will Clara back into existence? Could he bring her back from the dead with an elixir concocted from sweat, tears, bits of her hair, and his own heart’s blood?
In his head, a typewriter is clacking noisily, the soundtrack for his every conscious dream: Enter Clara, rounding the staircase, her blood cool but not cold, a placid look on her face.
You jerk, she’d say with a smile.
Or better yet: You sure know how to keep a girl waiting, don’t you?
Or even better: I never stopped loving you but I stopped liking you a long time ago.
Oh, how the audience would fawn over her!
But this isn’t a script, this isn’t a scene, this is real life, and Clara will not enter. Clara is gone forever. Wendell thanks the owner for letting him look around and leaves the house forever.
—
HE REVS HIS ’98 OLDS, waiting for the light to change. His old pal Bucky Nesbitt is dead, and he needs a good Bucky story, one that will help people understand what a total character he was. He can’t believe Bucky’s dead. Since when were all his friends dying off? We’re dinosaurs, Bucky said once. He’ll never have another friend like Bucky. What he needs is a story that will knock their socks off. Everyone will expect him to have one.
The time Bucky threw a fork at the trombone player when he and Wendell were in New Orleans for a shoot. The time Bucky stood up in the middle of a particularly boring premiere to belt out the national anthem. The time Bucky dragged him to a street party in Mexico City, turned around, his face gaunt but happy, and said, “Brother, we aren’t ever going home, are we?”
•IV•
THE REUNION MACHINE
Our plane landed in Little Rock in the early evening, the last splash of sunlight at the far end of the runway, and after we found our bags on the carousel we caught a shuttle to the rental car office, where a man in a tight blue jacket issued us a small red sedan. The hotel room Annie had booked for us was downtown, near the river, and we ate dinner that night at a bar and grill not too far from the Clinton Presidential Center.
The city was very quiet and almost no one was out on the street, which we chalked up to the cool weather. I hadn’t brought along a warm enough coat—I was wearing only a suit jacket. Upstairs Annie called her parents to check in on Fisher. Afterward we undressed and, for the sixth time that day, mapped Sally Zinker’s address. A small part of me feared that once we reached the address, we’d find the building empty, burned out, an industrial-waste site. It even seemed possible to me that her study was in fact an elaborate test designed to measure a subject’s eagerness to believe in something as far-fetched as a mysterious spirit communication machine. Perhaps Sally Zinker was a fabrication, her book written by a team of psychologists, clues about the machine sprinkled all over the Internet to lure people like me—death-obsessed, conspiracy-minded suckers who would believe in almost anything. We would arrive at the building, ring a bell, and a camera would snap our pictures. Psychologists in white coats would rush out, lead us into interview rooms, and map our sad, easily duped brains. Our pictures would ultimately appear in the book these psychologists would publish. The mug shot of two dupes, the caption would say. Three of the fifteen people we told about the device actually paid money and traveled to find it, they’d write, and here is what they look like and here is where they live and here are their email addresses.
Annie encouraged me to think of it as a vacation. If we found Sally and she had a machine, great, but if not, at least we had a few nights in a hotel room together. We threw back the blankets and watched TV for an hour before Annie fell asleep. I wrapped the sheet around me, mummy-like, and stared up at the ceiling, willing myself to fall asleep, but my mind resisted. I was too worked up.
I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, watched the water drip off my nose and my eyelashes. Then I flipped open my suitcase and began flinging my clothes back into the compartment, yanking shirts off the hangers in the closet. In the morning we would leave this place. We would drive right back to the airport, return the car, and fly home. We’d be in Shula by morning. We could forget about the Reunion Machine. And Sally Zinker. We could move forward with our lives and await the end like everyone else in the world. Utterly clueless.
Eventually I gave up on giving up and went to bed.
Three hours later I woke to the sound of the weather channel. Annie was dressing at the foot of the bed.
We went downstairs for a quick breakfast before getting back into the rental car.
Annie was wearing tight jeans and a wool blazer over a nice white untucked shirt. She looked very put-together, and I wondered if she’d dressed with Anthony in mind.
The GPS guided us over a bridge, to the north side of the river, to what felt like an industrial part of town—into a neighborhood with long blocks of pharmacies and gas stations and Auto Zones. We passed a Mexican restaurant and a T-Mobile store and then our destination appeared ahead of us on the left, a squat brick building painted white with faded letters across the side that said The Hobby Shoppe.
Shoppe—an Old English spelling? A letter variant for the purposes of trademark?
The building appeared to have very little history whatsoever. The front windows were covered with tar paper, and weeds had sprouted up through the cracks in the asphalt. Walking around to the far side, we discovered a green Nissan Xterra, its windows rolled down, a newspaper in the passenger seat, a pair of reading glasses on the dash.
“It’s hers,” Annie said excitedly. “She’s here.”
She knocked on the back door, which was heavy and wide. Her knuckles barely made any noise at all against it. A few inches above our heads was a small square window with gridded glass. I reached up and knocked there instead.
About thirty seconds passed—I was on the verge of suggesting we turn away—before we heard a series of dead bolts clicking and turning. Annie looked at me and tried to reassure me with a smile. I stepped back and slipped my hands into my pockets, not wanting to seem too eager. When the door dragged open, there stood the elusive Sally Zinker. She looked very much like her hologram, though her hair was longer and much grayer now. She was wearing khakis and a black fleece. She coughed once, and then again, her face turning red, a balled-up fist like a stone rolled across the open tomb of her mouth.
“Names?” she managed to ask.
“Jim and Annie Byrd,” Annie said.
“Very good, you’ve made it. Please come in. Let’s chat.”
She stepped aside without a word, creating just enough space for us to enter the building. The door banged shut behind us, and she turned all the dead bolts. We followed her down a short, dark hallway, breathing in a faint mildew smell not quite masked by cleaning chemicals. She directed us into a dingy kitchenette, its Formica counters bubbling, the plastic coating peeling off the cabinets, a set of mustard-yellow chairs that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1970s fast-food chain.
“Coffee’s there if you’d like some,” she said, disappearing down the hall.
Coffee crystals were scattered across the countertop, which was splotched with dried half-moon coffee stains. In the trash can by the empty watercooler were a dozen food wrappers, a crunched-up white paper bag, plus empty creamer and sugar packets. Once upon a time this kitchen had clearly served as a break room for the Hobby Shoppe’s employees. I wondered how many of her meals Sally ate each day in this miserable, overly lit windowless hovel.
I poured us cups of coffee, not because I needed one but because it was a way of distracting myself from what came next, and then sat down in one of the mustard chairs. Annie leaned up against the wall with her arms crossed. When I checked my phone, I realized that the bars were blinking rapidly, and I no longer had service.
The Afterlives Page 24