I hadn’t been removed from existence. Possibly I’d only changed scale. I was a daisy particle! Thinking this made it so. I strobed, sparkled.
Slowly I began to see people again. Those streaming light-shapes. Robert Lennox. Clara. A little dog barking at my feet. My father, too. And [SUBJECT 42]. I saw the lady who used to own the restaurant. People I didn’t know, too. I didn’t recognize most of them. I saw a woman on her knees with a scrub brush. A fat man with a jowly face staring up at me with sad eyes. I saw you, [SZ]. You were running wires between the spindles with sticky tape. A hundred other people, too. All of you were popping in and out of view, very rapidly, overlapping. You were there together, only you didn’t even know it. It was overwhelming.
You know how when you slow down a film enough on the reel you can see the little lines between the frames? Somehow I’d slid between the frames. I was out of sync, and being out of sync, I could see all the other frames, and they were all stacked on top of each other. Somehow, understanding this allowed me to pop back into my life. Into the stream of my life.
SZ: So you were off the stairs?
44: I was and I wasn’t. I no longer see the stairs, at this point, let’s put it that way. What I see now is a beach. I look up and I’m sitting on a beautiful beach. In a chair. My feet are down in the warm sand. Beer in my hand. The flies are out. The little black ones. I’m swatting at them. I’m a White Hair.
SZ: A what-hair?
44: Older, retired. Nearly bald. Sore-kneed. I’m maybe late sixties. There’s a man in a red bathing suit walking toward me with a toddler in his arms. My son. I have a son, and he’s calling to me, I can see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear him over the noise of the ocean. I look to my left . . .
SZ: What’s wrong?
44: It’s not [SUBJECT 42]. That’s who I expect to find, when I turn, but instead it’s someone else, some other woman. [SUBJECT 42]’s gone. She’s dead. I remember this. I’ve outlived her. I can feel her absence tentacling through me. A bubbling emptiness. But the death isn’t recent. Enough time has passed that I’ve settled into this new life. This life without her. What I mean is, it’s not an unbearable sadness I feel. I’m not mourning her anymore so much as getting by. The boy—the man in the red bathing suit—he’s ours, [SUBJECT 42]’s and mine, but [SUBJECT 42] has died, and now I’m with this other woman. She’s older, too, blond-haired, a dye job, I think, nice-looking. She looks up from her magazine and asks if I’ve put any lotion on my face. I love this woman! It’s different than my love for [SUBJECT 42], but it’s real, I can feel it. We’re good to each other, me and this woman. We take care of each other. She’s good to my son, to Fisher. Fisher, my stepdaughter, she’s not here on the beach, but she’s still in my life. She’s out there somewhere, I know that.
Do you think it’s possible that any of this is true, that it’s my future and that I somehow saw it? Has anyone else ever seen their future?
SZ: Honestly? No. You’re the first.
44: So maybe it wasn’t real then.
SZ: You’re the first to report something like this, but then again you’re also the first to use the machine with a condition such as yours. No other near-death survivors, as far as I’m aware. Maybe you were prepared for this experience, on some level, and didn’t even realize it. Maybe you were able to go deeper because of it.
44: The moment on the beach, it was very brief, no more than a couple of seconds, and it was a little fuzzier than everything else I’d seen, a little foggier, very impressionistic. It’s also the last thing I remember before waking up in the hole, naked, on the floor, puking my guts out.
SZ: A normal reaction. Nausea. Itchy skin. Swollen ankles. Headaches. Diarrhea. Flu-like symptoms. All very typical. How’s your heart?
44: Well, it feels all right. Beating obviously. But my phone still says there’s been a connection error. What’s your little wand exist-o-meter thingy say—?
SZ: You’re up to sixty-four percent now. Your body seems to be taking slightly longer than is typical to recuperate. Again I’m wondering if it has something to do with your particular medical history.
44: Should I be alarmed?
SZ: Not at all. This isn’t always very accurate. There’s a margin of error. You could very well be in the low seventies. Don’t worry. A solid meal and a roll in the hay and you’ll be back in the normal range lickety-split.
44: Sex and food help you exist more?
SZ: If you’re asking me if I have empirical data to back that up, the answer is no, I don’t. But it would make sense, wouldn’t it? You’ll eventually stabilize.
44: God, if I really saw the future. [SUBJECT 42] . . . Should I tell her what I saw?
SZ: That’s your decision, [SUBJECT 44]. That’s entirely up to you.
44: But isn’t it possible that you don’t really understand yet what your machine does? Maybe it just messed with my brain and gave me a really intense hallucination.
SZ: Given the relative consistency of people’s experiences, I rather doubt it. Besides, even if I was studying your brain with an MRI machine while you were in the chamber, even if I had these neat little brain scans that showed activation in your—I don’t know—your orbital gyri or whatever, even if I had all that, what difference would it make? Would that prove you’d never left your brain behind or would it only mean your brain was, on some level, still connected to your roving consciousness, still registering it the way a seismograph does little far-off vibrations?
Listen, I’ll never be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the machine is doing what I say it can do. I recognize that. But in my heart, I know what it does. I know what it’s capable of doing. Maybe you didn’t like what you saw, but I suspect deep down you feel the same way. You know where you’ve been.
44: I don’t want to tell her.
SZ: Then don’t. Keep it to yourself. She doesn’t ever need to know.
I was supremely aware of my body as I left Sally Zinker’s. The flex of each follicle in the cool morning breeze, the weight of each step, the rhythm of my breath, the uneven nail on my left thumb, every stomach gurgle. Back at the hotel, riding in the elevator, I examined myself in its three mirrors, turning this way and that. I tugged at my skin and watched it shrug back into its appropriate tautness around my muscles and bones. Where was I in this mess of cells?
Apparently I only sixty-four percent existed—I was a haze, a cloud, halfway to a hologram—but as far as I could tell I was entirely solid. My toes explored the cavities of my shoes, prodding, scrunching. Pushing against the outer world, feeling its shape, its firmness—my shoes, the floor, the mirrors—confirmed that I was here, in this elevator, in this hotel, on this planet, in this life.
My phone rang as the door whooshed open. It was Annie. She’d just woken up. It was almost dawn.
“You used the machine,” she said forlornly.
“Hold on,” I said. “I’m almost there.”
At the door, I fumbled with the key. On the drive here I’d debated what to tell her about what I’d seen, especially my vision of a future in which she was no longer a part of my life. I wondered if any good would come from such an admission. I didn’t want to unnecessarily alarm her. What if, by telling her, I’d set a series of events in motion that somehow precipitated her death? I was thinking of Greek tragedies, of kings who tried, vainly, stupidly, to avoid a fate foretold and ended up killing their own fathers and sleeping with their mothers. If ancient literature had taught me anything, it was that to struggle against a predicted future would only guarantee its inevitability.
The door opened, and there she was, in a T-shirt and underwear. I wasn’t Oedipus but Odysseus. Seeing her it wasn’t fear I felt but an intense longing. I threw my arms around her and kissed her neck and her arms and her mouth. I hadn’t planned on doing this. Perhaps sensing my desperation, she pulled me into the room. “Come in at least,” she sai
d. We tottered forward, let the door swing shut. She swiveled around and I grabbed her from behind, helping her with her shirt, letting it hit the floor. She leaned back into me, rolling her head to the side, and slowly we waddled over to the bed. I worked loose my shirt. I lay down on top of her, leaving no space at all between our skin.
Distantly I was aware that this moment would end, too soon, that this ache would run away from us, and we would roll over to our separate sides of the bed, to our separate quarters, we would retreat to our separate worlds. But for now, right now, our worlds were, if not the same, at least overlapping. Beneath the blur of her skin, the tiny hairs on her neck, the jut of her shoulder blades, a thought flitted through my brain: an image of our bodies, their boundaries blurred, a confusion of atoms, electrons trading nuclei, our skins merging. Was this why the soul wrapped itself in flesh?
I finished with my face pressed to her chest, her skin glossy where my mouth had been. The world stippled back into view, and we climbed up the bed and under the sheets. I was curled up to her back, my arm around her waist.
“I can’t believe you used the machine,” she said after a long silence. “I should hate you right now.”
“Well, I’m fine,” I said, leaving out the fact that my HeartNet had suffered a connection error and was quite possibly offline. “I survived.”
She squeezed my hand. “Are you still mad at me? About Anthony?”
“No, not mad.”
“Do you want me to tell you what happened? Because I will.”
“Please don’t.”
We were quiet again for a few moments.
“Did you find your father?” she asked.
I nodded. “I think I did, yes.”
“It was so real, wasn’t it?”
“Real—but, also, somehow, fixed? Predetermined?”
“I know what you mean. Sort of like reading a book you’ve already read before. You know where the story’s going next, you know how it has to go. The characters can only ever say what they’re supposed to say. Still, to be back there again . . .”
“I think I’m still in a state of shock. We followed the script, mostly, but behind each moment, I really did feel like he was there with me, like we were experiencing this together. Like we were talking to each other but the words were the moments themselves.”
“Yes, exactly, that’s it.”
“Would you do it again?” I asked.
“I don’t need to.”
I couldn’t decide if she was being evasive. I kissed her shoulder and rolled away. Our flight left in two hours. I took a long, hot shower while Annie packed our bags. We returned our rental car and then rode a shuttle to the airport, where we ate breakfast in the food court. Stirring her parfait, Annie seemed distracted and vaguely upset. I asked her what was wrong.
“Let’s just assume, for a moment, that the machine worked, that we really reached the afterlife,” she said.
“I thought we were already assuming that, but okay.”
“When you were there—think back for a second—did you feel like you had the answers to your questions? I mean, did you feel any more certainty about what it means to be alive than you did before?”
Over the loudspeaker, a flight attendant announced a gate change.
“Not really,” I admitted. “I was just as confused there as here.”
She took a few bites of her parfait and balled up her napkin, dropping it on the tray. I wasn’t very hungry either.
“The whole time I was gone,” she said, “whether I was with you or Anthony or anyone, I had this feeling that it wasn’t over, that I’d only reached another level—I can’t think of a better word for it than that, level—and there was still more to come. What I mean is, I think there was farther to go. I’d only scratched the surface of it. At the very end, I was on the cusp of it, like if I just reached a little more, I’d get there, to the next place, whatever it was. I was hardly there at all and already I was wondering what came next, you know?” She thought for a moment. “What’s that all about?”
We gathered our bags off the floor and started walking toward our gate. Once we’d boarded the plane, she stuffed her magazine in the seat pocket, and I untied my shoes. Ten minutes later we were in the air, thousands of feet over the earth, shuddering toward home.
“The afterlife had its own afterlife,” she said. “That was the feeling I had. One afterlife after the next.”
I wasn’t at all comforted by that idea, by the possibility of multiple afterlives and a soul hungering through them for eternity. What if we weren’t going to lose each other just once—here on earth—but an infinite number of times as we moved through the various levels of consciousness, across the planes of existence? It was an exhausting thought.
She brought her purse into her lap and removed a stack of inmate one-acts. The page on top she’d already marked heavily with red pen. In the top corner, I saw a small check mark. Killer, she’d written beneath it. A joke? She looked out the window, into the haze, and then over at me with a pleasant half-smile, which faded away into a serious expression I couldn’t quite discern. I thought then of what I’d seen, my glimpse of the future, the beach, the other woman, and I fought the urge to confess every horrible detail to her.
She clicked her red pen, flipped through the papers, and set to work, making little notes in the margins, scrunching her eyes, biting her lower lip, raking her teeth across it absentmindedly. I reclined in my chair and, still watching her, nodded off. The plane was descending when I was jostled awake again, and Annie was putting away her things. The landing gear clunked open beneath us. Annie, knowing me for a nervous flyer, patted the top of my hand and laughed to herself.
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“You and me,” she said.
“What about us?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Lazarus. Back from the dead.”
CLARA HOPSTEAD LENNOX
THE DOG IS ON FIRE! Clara rips the cloth off the dining room table and chases him into the kitchen, but the dog slams into the china cabinet and collapses, all his fur burned away. The smell makes her want to retch. The dog’s name is Houdini. He was the runt of the litter, a little cocker spaniel, white and orange. Her sister named him Houdini because he could escape from any chain, any leash, any rope, any situation. She calls up the stairs for Robert, poor Robert, who’s been in bed for three days.
—
SHE GOES TO SIT in a chair by the window, the sunlight streaming through the glass, so hot across her lap, and she’s feeling so tired, but here comes Robert, stomping down the stairs. He jams his arms into his coat. She asks him where he’s going, and he says he’s off to pay the electric and waves the bill in her face. But she’s already paid the electric! It’s the gas he needs to pay, not the electric. She’s got the notice in an envelope, somewhere. She searches for it in the hutch. He needs to take the notice with him, but he’s out the door before she can find it.
—
HER FATHER IS SITTING at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee, his hat in his lap, a baleful look on his face. He’s hoping for another loan, and yet he’s come round while Robert’s at work.
“Do you think Robert’d mind?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll see what I can do. We’re not exactly in the best shape either, Daddy. We’re all doing our best.”
“Yes, but we owe the Hausers three months. They’ve been patient with us but that goodwill won’t last long. They’ve got loans of their own. Plus there’s May and her school.”
—
THE PARK. A cool spring day. Little green buds have appeared in all the trees. Birds flit from branch to branch. The streetcar cranks along at the edge of the park, ringing its bell. Clara runs her fingers through her little sister’s stringy brown hair as May reads a book.
&nbs
p; “What’s this one about?” Clara asks.
Irritated to have been roused from her story, May hardly looks up at all. She says it’s about a boy who gets into a hot-air balloon and somehow lands in the future. In the future everyone shares everything. The world is ruled by a council of wise elders. There is no war. Machines grow and prepare all the food. Machines transport you from A to B. Machines make you prettier, handsomer.
“Don’t you ever wish you’d been born in the future?” May asks her, after a moment.
“Well, you have, sort of,” Clara says. “Except it’s somebody else’s. Not yours.”
—
THE FUTURE: a fire, a dog, the staircase.
She does her best to avoid the future.
And yet here she is again. Only today there’s no fire, thank God. It’s the year before the fire. She’s on her way down to the sitting room, to join Robert before dinner, when she hears a voice. She lingers for a moment, her hand on the bannister, but can’t make out any of the words. Where is it coming from? Not from outside. Not from downstairs.
Robert doesn’t believe her.
“You’ve got a powerful imagination,” he says. “You always have.”
—
ROBERT COMES THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR, shaking his head back and forth.
“I need another trip to Atlanta,” he says. “I need to see my cousin.”
But she doesn’t want to hear any more about Atlanta. Enough about Atlanta! He’s been down there twice already this year, and it’s not even September. The last time he was gone for a full month, and she was alone in the house with no one but Houdini, the dog, the escape artist, who cannot be contained.
—
THE DOG COMES RUNNING down the stairs. On fire! How on earth did the dog catch fire? That poor, miserable creature! She runs halfway up the stairs, to the landing, and yells for Robert to please come help, but there’s no answer from him. He’s useless, in bed again for three whole days. She grabs the dining cloth off the table and goes after the dog to put out the flames. Houdini is already dead, or nearly dead, not moving at all, and all she can do is scream for Robert.
The Afterlives Page 29