Up ahead, an Applebee’s beckoned. I went inside and sat down at the bar, ordered a Bud Light with a wedge of lime. Two other men sat at the bar, looking lonely and confused. They stared up at a muted cop procedural on the screen over the bar. The TV detectives were circling a dead body on a golf course in what looked like Miami.
“Do we know who killed him?” I asked one of the men, slipping deep into my Southern accent.
“Do what?” he asked, eyes still locked up on the screen. He seemed irritated to have to make words with his mouth.
The other man, a few seats away, laughed into his beer.
The body was shown on a gurney, sliced open by the medical examiner. Then we, the viewers, were plunged into a sea of blood cells, little red flat balloons bouncing and colliding.
I was grateful to have found this place. Sitting at this bar, with these men, drinking in the middle of the afternoon, it was possible, at least for a moment, to pretend there was no such thing as a Reunion Machine. But ten minutes later I had a text from Annie. She was finished debriefing Sally—and where was I? I settled my tab and walked back to the Hobby Shoppe. Duke had arrived in my absence. He was dressed as if he was about to set out on a long and difficult hike in the mountains, a brown thermal shirt under a fleece jacket. His glasses were strapped to his head with a purple foam band.
“Morning,” he said, serious-faced.
“This way,” Sally said, and led him back toward the machine.
Annie was in the bathroom again, but this time she admitted me when I tapped on the door. When I entered the room, she was standing at the sink, splashing water across her face. I waited as long as I could, about a minute, before asking if she’d seen him, if she’d contacted Anthony.
“Yes,” she said.
“And?”
She turned to me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Jim, listen, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it right now. I’ll tell you everything, I promise. But I just need a little while to”—she searched for the right word—“figure out what just happened to me. Nothing is wrong, okay? Please don’t think anything is wrong. Sally says what I’m feeling, it’s not unusual. But I just need to sit with this awhile longer. I’m still sort of”—her hands dropped from my shoulders—“processing.”
I told her I understood, though of course I didn’t, not at all. I wanted to know exactly what had happened, and this seemed ominous to me, her wanting to wait. Her wanting to process. Never had that word seemed so portentous. Without consulting Sally first, we left the Hobby Shoppe together a few minutes later. I wrapped my arm around her waist as we walked to the car, and though she didn’t pull away from me, she didn’t exactly lean into my embrace either.
B ack in the room, Annie said she was wiped out and needed a nap, and so I watched television while she dozed. Soon after waking up again, she called Fisher. School was out, and she was at C-Mac’s house for the afternoon. The call was a quick one. Annie jumped into the shower, and I watched a little television while I waited for her to emerge. Through the door crack I could see her toweling dry, her right foot up on the edge of the tub, steam curling behind her. I stepped into the bathroom and pulled her into a hug. She didn’t resist me but neither did I feel any real encouragement or interest. Her towel fell to her feet, and I began to tug off my boxers, but then she kissed me in such a way that I knew meant she didn’t want to continue.
“I’m still feeling a little wiped out,” she said, touching her stomach. “After dinner maybe?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I’m thinking room service, if that’s all right.”
She began to rub moisturizer into her face.
“So,” I said. “Have you processed yet?”
She continued moisturizing, disappearing the white cream into her eyebrows.
“Let’s talk about it at dinner,” she said.
“I’d like to talk about it now, please.” I stepped over to her.
“It’s only been three hours, Jim.”
“So you won’t tell me anything at all then?”
She scooted by me out of the bathroom and sat down on the bed.
“I’m not trying to be evasive, I’m really not. I just don’t know how to describe it. It was nothing at all like what I expected. I was all over. Bouncing around. But then, eventually, I found myself back in my old apartment, the one in Charleston, just sort of lounging around and then in walks Anthony with a couple of his friends, and it was just like it used to be. I mean, I was who I used to be, Jim. I was twenty years old, and I was going to be some big movie star actor one day, and I’m so full of, like, hope and excitement, then I see him come through the door . . .” She was crying now. “I just don’t know how to put words to it. It was so, so real. It was like time travel or something.”
I considered this for a moment. “So you were twenty again? Fisher and me, we didn’t exist to you anymore—or yet?”
“I think, vaguely, I was aware of you, yes. You were out there. Or in here.” She indicated her heart. “I was overwhelmed, Jim. I don’t know what else to say. It was incredible and it was heartbreaking and exhausting.”
“What else happened? He just walked in with his friends and that was it or—?”
She shook her head back and forth and closed her eyes. “Jim, I feel like I’ve been gone for a week. That’s what makes this so difficult.”
“You spent a whole week with Anthony?”
“Well, I was only gone for a fraction of a second.”
“But it felt like a week to you?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Yes. Maybe even two weeks.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Just so I’m clear. While you were using the machine, you didn’t really remember me or Fisher. You were twenty years old again. You were back with your dead husband. And you spent a couple of weeks with him, thinking things were just like they used to be.”
She didn’t say anything. I could tell I was upsetting her, but I was unable to control myself. While I’d sat in that miserable kitchenette, Annie had spent half a month with Anthony.
“Did you . . .” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. He’s dead, Jim.”
I dressed quickly and grabbed the empty ice bucket off the dresser.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I wasn’t even really sure. I muttered something about a drink and left the room with the bucket in my hand. When I reached the machine halfway down the hall, I stared down into the ice for a minute with the scoop in my hand. Then I tossed the bucket into the mountain of chunky ice and started walking toward the elevator bank, the carpet a blur beneath my feet. I went downstairs to the lobby, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down on the couch near the front desk. A flat-screen TV on the wall was showing the news. A group of reporters were discussing a mass shooting at a middle school. The volume was muted, and so I had to read the closed captions. A man with bunched eyebrows and a horsy mouth seemed to be yelling.
>>This guy, this crazy guy, the shooter, I mean, what do we expect, he had hate in his heart, he was a total villain, he was the worst of us, and so of course it’s okay for the government to step in here, don’t you think, to work with the manufacturer of this heart device, to do whatever it takes to stop him, to bring him down, blow up his heart and save innocent lives.
I asked a hotel clerk to please turn up the television, but she couldn’t locate the remote. The captions were obviously lagging behind the conversation. A woman on the other side of the anchor desk was talking now and making wild gestures with her hands, and even after it cut away to a commercial break, in which a koala bear was hugging a roll of plush toilet paper, the captions continued to appear:
>>Let’s not make this a political issue, let’s not do that, this is bigger than that, we have familie
s who are hurt, we have children that have to be buried and we simply don’t know enough yet to say much of anything about the shooter, but you have to admit that it’s concerning, when a private company is cooperating with the government to this extent, when you’re using a heart device to kill a man remotely. It’s an assassination, no matter the target, that’s what this is, and you have to wonder where this will stop, you have to consider the consequences.
Other hotel guests, passing through the lobby, weren’t paying any attention to the television. An elderly gentleman sitting in a nearby chair seemed to be the only other person watching the program. I asked him if he understood what the reporters were saying. Had they mentioned a company called HeartNet? The man shrugged and said he hadn’t been paying attention, sorry, he’d been lost in thought. I tossed my coffee in the trash and went out for a walk. The early evening air was a little wet and cold. I had no idea where I was going, only that I wanted to walk.
Where are you? Annie texted.
Are we okay? she asked.
Y, I wrote.
Are you sure?
Y.
Please tell me where you are right now, Jim.
I didn’t respond to that one.
Eventually I wound up near the river—it was getting dark—and approaching the river’s edge, I could hardly distinguish the water from the shore, except for where the city lights, yellow, orange, and blue, rippled across the surface. If not for the winter and the brown foamy effluvia chumping at the edges of the water, I might have removed my clothes, stepped down into the water, and waded out through the reeds, to squish the mud between my toes and feel the slap of the water against my chest.
Whenever I’m at the beach, I’m always the first one in the ocean. I drop my towel and the chairs and I yank my shirt over my head and I march out briskly, not stopping until I’m out far enough to dive at the first sizable wave. I collapse into this wave, surrender myself to the water, and stay under as long as I can before reemerging to swim a few laps, backstroke, so that I can stare up into the sky and feel the sun’s warmth as an opposition to the cold beneath the surface. Here, horizontal, clapped tight between the hands of water and air, I don’t feel safe or protected but real, a being in the truest sense of that word.
A hopeful thought occurred to me then, glistening: perhaps Annie had not actually visited with her dead husband but had instead only relived a week that resided in her memory. The machine had simply activated the relevant memories, made them feel fresh again, present, had given them dimensionality. If this was the case, then she hadn’t really reconnected with Anthony but with another aspect of herself. This seemed like an important distinction to me. Who didn’t live in their own memories from time to time? Possibly the machine had only triggered a very real-seeming hallucination.
What do you bet that right now, somewhere in the United States, a graduate student with halitosis is devising an experiment in which he will use powerful magnetic fields to create currents of neurons in a human brain that might cause visual hallucinations—bands and balls of light, spectral presences. Somewhere else a neurobiologist is writing a paper that dismisses your dead grandfather’s ghost as a communication breakdown between your visual cortex and something called the lateral geniculate nucleus, through which all information passes on its way from the eye. At this very moment, be assured, a schizophrenic man, strapped inside an imaging machine, is being instructed to converse with the voices in his head while his brain is being mapped. On the other side of the country, a woman who claims she is able to leave her body behind is sitting on a cold metal table in a paper gown while two men outside in the hall are quietly discussing her unusually active cerebellum.
All this to say, Annie’s reunion with Anthony might not have been real at all. It might have simply been a biological reaction to a powerful wave of radiation—or whatever.
Turning away from the river, I climbed up a set of concrete stairs.
Another text buzzed: Please don’t use the machine. YOUR HEART!!!!!!
I didn’t respond to that one either.
Jim? she wrote. Let’s just go home in the morning and go back to normal, please.
I was almost at the top of the stairs when a dinosaur twice my height came hurtling down the hillside, moving right for me. The creature whipped through the darkness, the white and tan feathers in its head shimmering iridescently. It had a long, muscled neck and its snout was very narrow and sharp. A few feet away from me it stopped to huff loudly through its snout. Two others just like it appeared on top of the hill, bodies hunched forward as if in pursuit of prey.
I hadn’t moved an inch. My heart was beating very fast. I was terrified. But then the dinosaurs fell into a chorus line, and the biggest one announced, with a slight Southern twang, the opening of the dinosaur exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Center. For a limited time only, the dinosaur said, kids under five were free. The dinosaurs glowed as if they’d swallowed a light. Before the holograms dispersed and dissolved into the night, they smiled at me.
Not long after that I walked back to the hotel and got in my car.
So where’s wifey?” Sally asked.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I want to use the machine.”
“It’s a little late. Are you sure about this?”
“I’m aware of the risks,” I said.
She invited me inside, and I followed her down the hallway, toward the room into which I had yet to be admitted. Chamber number one, she called it, opening the door to a large square room with concrete walls, at the center of which was a massive concrete cylinder. A chamber within a chamber, in other words.
“So who is it you want to contact?” Sally asked. “Your dearly departed dad?”
I nodded. Yes, him. Who else?
“Let me give you some advice. Do you meditate, Jim?”
“I have before, but no, not regularly.”
“It can be a little disorienting, this process, and I think it often helps to hold on to a single image or a mantra. It’s easy to lose yourself in there.”
To the right of the first door was machinery that I never had the chance to properly investigate, then or later: large foam-padded tubes, glossy red panels, computer circuitry, ringed plates, something that looked like a water heater tank. To enter the cylinder, you had to turn left and walk along a narrow passageway lit by naked bulbs in the ceiling. All the walls were made of concrete, and so was the floor, though Sally had laid out small mismatched Oriental rugs, one after the other, a network of oversized swatches that led you to a small ladder that had clearly been taken from an old pool.
She climbed up first and then waited for me at the top. When I reached her, I saw that she was sitting beside an open hatch door that led down into the cylinder.
“I have to go in there?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said.
I peered down into the hole.
“You worried about your heart?” she asked.
“I’m more worried I do this and see nothing at all.” Wanting to seem brave, I attempted a smile. “Besides, these HeartNet devices, apparently they’re faulty. According to the news, my heart could explode any second anyway.”
Sally nodded. “Well, they all do, eventually. Scale back enough, time-wise, and all we are is a quick parade of exploding hearts.”
She slid down through the hatch using a small ladder bolted to an inner wall and then stood at the bottom gazing up at me. It was about seven feet deep. I climbed down next. The metal ladder was warm and vibrated gently in my hands. When my feet touched the ground, I turned around and there was Sally, her face hardly visible at all in the darkness. This innermost chamber had no light source of its own. Its diameter was maybe six feet.
I felt as if I’d climbed down into a cave. That’s when I noticed the metal strips embedded in the walls, little silvery flaps. She instructed me to
stand where she was standing, directly in the middle, and then she climbed back up the ladder. Once she was at the top, she peered down at me again and asked me to toss up my clothes.
“All of them?”
“That’s right.”
“But . . .”
“This is how it works. Come on.”
I did as I was asked, folding everything into a little bundle. I balled up my socks, tucked them in my shoes, and stacked my shoes on top of my clothes. Sally reached down, and I delivered them up into her hands.
“Your watch, too,” she said.
I gave her my watch. She wished me luck and shut the hatch, creating a total darkness. I was naked—but not cold. I stuck out my arms and walked forward until my fingertips found the wall. I patted along the rough concrete until I found those little metal strips.
I’ve never really considered myself claustrophobic, but I admit that I began to panic at the thought of being abandoned down here. It was rather tomb-like, after all. An oversized sarcophagus. I stood very still for a few moments, waiting for something to happen. Then I heard a noise, a motorized gurgling, almost like a sump pump sucking away water. Not just one sump pump but three or four working in concert, the noise growing like an approaching train.
I touched the walls again. The little metal flaps had opened and shuttered toward me, and I burned my fingers on the metal. I backed away, toward the cylinder’s center, and waited there with my eyes closed. The noise outside the chamber was growing louder and louder, and now seemed to pulsate. I could feel it traveling as a series of waves, with peaks and valleys, rippling through my body, through my flesh, through my bones. The sensation was nearly pleasant, except then I was reminded of X-ray machines, all those little vibrations, and I began to worry about radiation, about poisoning. It occurred to me I might be sitting in a tremendous microwave oven. What did I really know about the machine, after all? I didn’t want to wind up with cancer.
The Afterlives Page 27