Duke, I learned, had once worked for Hewlett-Packard, but now he was employed by a company that made body cams for police. He traveled the country testifying at trials in which a body cam had behaved abnormally or failed. Essentially, he was a professional expert witness. “It’s almost always user error,” he said. “Nine times out of ten.” The cams, apparently, beeped a warning if the footage wasn’t being saved properly but half the time the cops would simply click through the warnings so that, when something bad happened, the camera wouldn’t be operational. Duke’s job was to explain to the jury that the failure was not the camera’s fault but the officer’s, though he had to explain this in such a way that he didn’t piss off the police departments, who were, after all, his customers. This typically meant staying as unemotional as possible, he said, and sticking to vague statements like, “The data in question was never actually captured due to a user malfunction and therefore cannot be retrieved.”
I got the sense that Duke was a no-nonsense individual, a person not easily rattled but also a tad robotic. He was twice divorced and lived in Nashville, where his company was based. He wanted to use the machine to talk to his son, who’d died just a few years earlier from cancer. Over the last few years he’d visited a handful of psychics—not highway palm readers or toll-free psychics but people who had demonstrable skills, like Claude—but none of them had been able to connect Duke with his son. Then a friend of his had suggested he call Sally.
I was about to tell him my story when Sally cleared her throat. Now that she had our attention, she crossed her legs and cupped both her hands over the highest knee.
“So,” she said, “now that you’re all here, a few things you should probably know. First, I can make no promises. If you talk to your dead grandmother or whatever, good for you, but I can’t guarantee anything. One gentleman last week said he spent what felt like an entire year talking telepathically to a blob of colored lights. Another woman said she was back in her mother’s old house, and it looked exactly the same, and they spent twenty or thirty minutes chatting over tea. So you can understand why I can’t tell you how this will go exactly.
“Second, there can be some side effects. Afterward, I mean. Some people get a bad headache, but usually it passes after a few days. Nothing that a little ibuprofen won’t help. However, almost everyone who uses the machine—and there’ve been about forty so far, mind you—gets pretty bad diarrhea immediately afterward. I’d suggest not eating anything morning-of. Third thing you should know—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but how does it work exactly? What’s the design? What does it do to you?”
Everyone looked at me. I’d interrupted.
Sally crossed her arms. “I’ll answer your question, Mr. Byrd, but I want to make something very clear. I’m not here to explain myself to you or to explain the machine or to try and convince you of anything. You came to me, did you not? You sought me out. You traveled to me. You knocked on my door.”
“I don’t think my husband is asking you to prove it works,” Annie said. “He’s just curious.”
“I understand,” Sally said sharply, “but until I publish, you’ll understand if I don’t want to say too much about the hows and the whats. The machine is an extension of something I worked on years ago when I was still with the university, I can tell you that much. That’s about as much as I’m willing to say about the technology itself. You’ve all read my book. You’re familiar with the daisies. What the machine does, effectively, is grab control of the daisy’s flicker state. I’ve figured out a way to flip the switch, not just for a single daisy but for an entire group of daisies—united into a single system, an object, a body, a brain, whatever.”
Sally took a long sip of her drink and then explained that only once she’d begun to wonder about consciousness having an immaterial aspect did it occur to her to test the machine on a living creature: paramecia, earthworms, rats.
“You did this to a rat?” Duke asked with a smile. “You made a rat disappear?”
“It’s not disappearance, it’s nonexistence. I’m sure you can appreciate the distinction. I haven’t been able to achieve total nonexistence, by the way. I can only get to something like twenty-three percent, but that seems to be enough.”
“Enough to what?” I asked.
“To dislodge your consciousness from time and space, obviously. To subtract your brain, which wants you to trust only in what you can see and touch, from the overall equation of you. It’s an out-of-body experience, essentially, because the body no longer exists to contain you. To limit you.”
“And this is safe?” Duke asked.
“I’m fairly certain it is,” Sally said, nodding. “I’ve done it a number of times myself, and all signs point to yes. I’m still here. But listen, you’re volunteering for this. You don’t have to do it. Of course there’s a small risk involved. And anyway, this little zap, it happens very, very fast. A fraction of a second. But it’s in this state that consciousness is free to wander. This is bigger than talking with the dead, if you haven’t already put that together. It doesn’t connect you to any single person. It’s a glimpse of the beyond. It bends you toward it. Yes, that’s probably a better word, bend. What the machine does is bend you away from this life and toward the next.”
Falling back into the couch, she took a long sip of her drink, seeming very pleased with herself. We sat quietly for a moment. I looked over at Annie, who was, with a very serious expression, stirring her drink with the tiny plastic straw. Duke scratched behind his ear with his index finger and then examined the tip of his finger. He didn’t seem bothered by any of this. Willa was watching Sally very closely. When Sally leaned forward again, she returned to talk of logistics: when to arrive, what to bring, what to expect. Twenty minutes later, Willa was the first to say goodnight, and then Duke stood and stretched and said he looked forward to tomorrow before departing as well. Annie and I were preparing to go, too, when Sally patted my arm and asked if I’d come to a decision.
“Decision about what?” Annie asked me.
“Oh,” Sally said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” She grabbed her purse and stood to go. “I’m off now. I’ll see you both in the morning. Get some sleep. And remember, maybe avoid breakfast tomorrow.”
With that she disappeared through the doors that led back into the hotel. The heat lamps that towered over us sizzled, glowing red. Annie and I sat back down in our chairs. The ice in my second drink had melted, and so I took a sip of that before confessing to Annie that, because of my HeartNet device, using the machine was perhaps not medically advisable. I tried to minimize the risk as much as possible, but Annie’s concern was apparent in her expression: a glassy-eyed sternness.
“Please tell me you’re not actually considering doing it,” she said.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I said.
“Don’t be so stupid,” she said. “Jim, honestly.”
“We’ve come all this way. It’s not that it’s necessarily unsafe for me, it’s just that she hasn’t tested the machine on someone like me yet. Probably it would be fine.”
“But you don’t know that for a fact.”
“Not for a fact, but I think it’s worth the risk, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure that it is.”
“You haven’t been through what I’ve been through,” I said, losing my temper. “You have no idea. I was dead, Annie. I died. And I was gone! Anyway, I don’t even need the device. Not all the time. It’s only there for emergencies. If it malfunctioned, my heart wouldn’t just stop beating.”
We’d both been drinking all evening, and my thoughts were a little soupy. I wasn’t entirely sure if I had a point to make, but I continued talking until the waiter came over to deliver the bill. I opened it, happy for a reason to avoid eye contact with Annie for a moment. Everyone had left without paying their tabs, I realized—even Sally. I dropped my
credit card in the tray and motioned for the waiter to return.
“Listen,” Annie said, “I don’t have to do this either, Jim. If you’d rather we just go home, we can. To be honest with you, all of this is beginning to feel a little scary. We have Fisher to think about. Maybe we shouldn’t be subjecting ourselves unnecessarily to bizarre experiments. I mean, why isn’t Sally still at a university, you know? If this is a scientific study, it’s extremely unorthodox. Why are we out to drinks like this? Should we really be meeting the other participants? Maybe this, your heart thing, is a sign. It’s the universe telling us to stop here. Maybe we should just go home.
“I haven’t been through what you’ve been through, that’s true, but you haven’t been through what I’ve been through either. You’ve never lost the person you love most in the world. You have no idea what that can do to you, Jim, you don’t.”
Sally opened the door in a pair of jeans and a baggy gray cardigan over a white T-shirt, looking somewhat bedraggled. She led us back into the kitchenette and invited us to make ourselves comfortable while we waited. I was not going to use the machine. Before going to sleep the night before I’d promised Annie that I wouldn’t take that risk. I wouldn’t put her through that. She would use the machine herself and then we would get on a plane the following day and fly home. When I informed Sally of my decision, she nodded and said that she understood, though I could tell she was disappointed.
A toilet flushed and water rushed through pipes behind the wall. Across the hall from the kitchenette was a bathroom, and its flimsy white door creaked open slowly a few moments later. There was Willa, her eyes squinched, arms loose at her sides. She’d already used the machine. She dried her hands with a crumpled paper towel, a lost expression on her face.
Sally went down the hall and returned with something that looked like an old-fashioned telephone—a wand that was attached via a thin gray cord to a small black box that she carried in the palm of her other hand. She waved the wand across Willa’s chest a few times. When I asked her what she was doing, she didn’t say anything, only held the little black box up to her face in order to read the tiny numbers that flashed onto a small green screen.
“You’ll be fine,” she said to Willa. “You’re already back up to eighty-nine percent.”
“Eighty-nine percent what?” Annie asked.
“Like the universe,” Sally said, “most people, on average, exist about ninety-three percent. There’s a range. Anything between ninety and ninety-six percent is fairly normal. The machine drops you down to about twenty-three percent for a fraction of a second, but you normalize pretty quickly.”
Willa looked at us as if she was going to be sick. Sitting down at the table, she rested her head on her arms.
“Was it worth it?” Annie asked her, daunted.
“It was worth it,” Willa reported, and began to delicately massage her temples.
Annie came over to me and took my hands. We were quiet for a moment, just staring into each other’s eyes.
“Be careful,” I said, as if she had any control over her own safety.
“I’m doing this for both of us. I’ll tell you everything that happens.”
Would I be able to believe in the afterlife if Annie told me there was one? I wasn’t sure. I hoped so.
“If I can talk to your dad, too, I will,” she said.
She kissed me on the lips, smiled weakly, and followed Sally out of the kitchen. I peered around the corner to watch them go. At the end of that hallway wasn’t just a machine; it was the great beyond, it was Anthony, and he was waiting for her.
“Good luck,” I called as she rounded the door.
I sat down beside Willa and reached for a small paper cup at the center of the table. I began to tear the cup into tiny, waxy strips, leaving only its waxy moon bottom. A clock on the wall by the cabinets was dead—or not dead, I realized, but broken. The thin red second hand twitched, trying and failing to keep the time. Willa sat up and blinked her eyes heavily.
“It’s like the worst hangover I’ve ever had,” she said.
“What happened in there?” I asked.
She was quiet for a long time and then looked over at me with what seemed to me an expression of pity. “For a long time I was nowhere at all. I just, sort of, was. I was aware of myself, but I was having trouble thinking or focusing. I forgot about the machine. About all of this. Then, very slowly, I began to see things, little snapshots. Scenes. From my life. I was reliving my life in little bits and pieces. I was a teenager again, going for a run with my sister, and then I was at my house, on the computer, trying to find Sally, and then I was in my sister’s apartment.” She looked down at her hands. “My sister was a photographer. For the AP. She was shot and killed three years ago in Islamabad.”
“God, that’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
Willa, nodding, stared spacey-eyed at the shredded cup on the table. “It was like I was really there. In her apartment in Beirut. It was so strange. I was standing there, watching her take pictures out her window. This went on for the longest time. I just stood there like an idiot. Then she turned to me and asked if I was ready to go eat.”
“Did she know she was dead?”
“I don’t know,” Willa said. “It wasn’t like that. Dead or alive, that didn’t really enter into it. We were just together again.”
I heard a noise outside in the hallway. It was Annie. She’d already returned! Without acknowledging me at all, she let herself into the bathroom across the hall and slammed the door hard behind her. I was shocked to see her so soon. She couldn’t have been gone for more than ten minutes. The lock on the bathroom door clicked before I reached it. Calling to her through it, I asked if she was okay, if I could get her anything, but she didn’t answer. I knocked harder and called out again.
“Give her a few minutes,” Sally said, behind me. “Be gentle.”
“What happened? Did it work?”
Sally shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her. Like I said, it’s a little different for everyone.”
I sat down on the floor outside the bathroom door to wait for Annie.
“Jim,” Sally said, “go back in the kitchenette, please. You’ll have a chance to talk with Annie, I promise. But I’m going to talk to her first, okay? I find it’s best if you try and document the experience as quickly as possible. Before it fades. This might take a little time. But it’s important we do this. It’s a little bit like a dream. You wake up and as the day goes on, the dream begins to fade. You start to forget.”
I stood up. “Are you sure she’s okay? Have you waved your little wand thing across her yet?”
“I will. She’s fine, Jim. Just go sit down.”
Reluctantly I returned to my seat in the kitchenette, where Willa was massaging her temples again. A few minutes later the bathroom door lock clicked, and Annie emerged. Her skin seemed very pale; her eyes, red and swollen. I rushed back out into the hall and put my hand to her back, to let her know that I was here and that I loved her. She looked over at me with the strangest expression. I had the uneasy feeling that she hardly recognized me—or rather, that she was trying to place me.
Ah yes, I could almost see her thinking, I believe I do know this man.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She nodded. “I’m fine.”
“We’ll be back soon,” Sally said, and led Annie away down the hall.
I sat back down at the table again. Willa smiled weakly at me.
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “Sally will just ask her to describe what happened, step by step. That’s all. She’ll even send you a copy of the transcript if you want.”
We sat quietly for a long time. I was desperate to think about anything other than Annie’s trip in the machine so I asked Willa where she was from.
“Hartford, originally,” she said. “But Boston right now. For school.”<
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“Grad school?” I asked.
She nodded. “Divinity school.”
“No kidding.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No reason, I guess,” I said. “So are you planning on being a preacher?”
“Episcopal priest,” she said, but seemed distracted now. She turned to face the doorway—in frustration? boredom? I couldn’t read her. Then Willa whipped her head back around, and she was staring at me again.
“You think I’m some kind of hypocrite for coming here,” she said. “You think anyone who’s training to be a priest shouldn’t need to talk to her dead sister using some crazy ghost machine, she should be able to get by on her faith alone.”
“I wasn’t thinking any of that,” I said, though in truth it was exactly what I’d been thinking, or at least considering.
“I mean, just because I want to know for a fact that my sister’s out there, just because I want a little proof, does that somehow disqualify me from leading a church? If you say yes to that, you’re crazy. Priests get to have their doubts, too. That’s their right. Show me a priest who doesn’t have any doubts, and I’ll show you . . .” Her voice dropped away, and her eyes pattered down to the table. She reached for an empty cup and slapped it down into her lap. I realized now I was not really a true participant in this conversation, that I was a bystander to a debate that had been raging in Willa’s head for who knows how long.
“If anything,” she continued, “I’ll be able to serve better. I mean, I’ll really know. I’ll be able to look people in the eyes, people who come to me with real grief and pain, and I’ll be able to tell them with certainty there truly is life after death.”
That seemed sensible to me.
Where was Annie? What was taking so long? I couldn’t be in that kitchenette any longer. I needed some air. I needed to breathe. I went outside, into the parking lot. An eighteen-wheeler roared by, farting exhaust. Across the street, attached to a gas station, was a car wash, all the stalls currently empty but the concrete dark and wet. I walked along the road for about a quarter mile. The Hobby Shoppe was in an industrial part of town. Weeds were growing up through the cracked lots. To keep from getting hit by any cars, I had to straddle a drainage ditch, one foot on either side of a nasty run-off stream full of beer cans and used condoms and apple cores and shopping bags wrinkled and wet like chunks of pale skin.
The Afterlives Page 26