The Afterlives

by Thomas Pierce

  There I was, up on the rickety stepladder, pouring seeds from a giant bag when my mother said, “God, Bill, you’re spilling half the seeds!” I didn’t correct her; and neither did Delphine. What would be the point of that? I smiled and nodded: Yes, I was spilling seeds, sorry. This wasn’t the first time she’d mistaken me for my father, and I saw no reason to embarrass her for such an innocent error. Better to let her go on thinking he’s still around, is my opinion. A pleasant delusion never hurt anyone.

  I wish I could report that in her senility my mother has become an easier person to tolerate, softer, more affable, less judgmental—I’m told this can happen as people age—but in truth she is just as unbearable as ever, perhaps even worse. Thank God for Delphine’s infinite reserve of patience and kindness. I do wonder if what I’m dealing with now is the true essence of my mother. Aging as a distillation process. The coarse salt bed left behind by the receding ocean.

  “There, now you’ll have your blue jays,” I said to her.

  If she has any fears of death, she hasn’t revealed them to me. I’ve never actually told her about the Reunion Machine—about seeing my father again—because I know she wouldn’t approve, but I have tried to subtly impart some of what I learned by using it. The soul abides, I tell her. Some aspect of you does. You’re like a thought. Or an idea. An echo. An echo in search of other echoes. You do not end here, on this planet, but then again, neither does the questioning. Neither does the doubt. The search for meaning, as unbearable as it sounds, might not end with our death.

  I tell her this, I suppose, because I don’t want her to expect too much. I don’t want her disappointed or confused when she disentangles from her body and finds herself in a place not totally unlike this one.

  Two manila envelopes—one addressed to me, one to Annie—arrived in the mail a few months after our return from Little Rock. Annie offered her transcript to me, but I turned down the chance to read it. It was private, I said. It belonged to her. I didn’t need to read it.

  “Then I won’t read yours either,” she said.

  I was, admittedly, relieved.

  I put them both in our safe-deposit box at the bank, and that was that.

  For a while, anyway.

  A year later Annie was pregnant. She’d been using a diaphragm, and so it was a total surprise. It was only after the birth of our son, William, that I began to doubt my decision to keep my vision from Annie. I’d done my best never to think about that moment on the beach, about a future in which Annie and I were no longer together, in which she was no longer here. But along came William, and with him, a seeming confirmation of what I’d seen and felt in the machine: Annie was going to die; I was going to outlive her. I’d be a White Hair one day, and Annie would not. For a time, even seeing an elderly couple out to dinner or on a walk was enough to drop me into a minor depression. Annie and I were never going to have that, were never going to be that. I tried to take solace in the fact that she ate well, she worked out, she exercised. She was fit, healthy.

  But my son’s every precious breath was a reminder of Annie’s fate and of the fact that I’d kept it a secret from her. The guilt was overwhelming, and one afternoon I brought home the transcript and told her she needed to read mine. It was time. I’d kept something from her, I said. Something terrible. She told me not to be dramatic. Still, I stayed downstairs until she was finished reading. Eventually she came and found me, pale, tired, looking like she’d just stumbled out of a bad dream.

  “Well, I understand why you didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “I hope you don’t hate me.”

  I was sitting in a chair, and Annie sat down beside me on its fat tan arm.

  “You can’t control what you saw.” She tried to smile but settled instead into a look of quiet frustration. “Any chance you remember the culprit? Is it cancer? Because if it’s cancer—”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

  She nodded. “Anyway, what does it matter if the afterlife is real, right?”

  “True. That’s true.”

  “I’m not going to obsess over it, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “We can talk about it as much or as little as you want. We don’t have to avoid the topic.”

  “But you avoided it until now.”

  “I did—and I apologize.”

  I looked down into my lap.

  “People learn they’re going to die every day,” she said. “I’m no different. Besides, this isn’t next year. This isn’t even two years from now.”

  “More like twenty years, I would think. I’d hardly call twenty years a death sentence.”

  She grimaced. Probably she hadn’t done the math, hadn’t put a number to it.

  “It’s funny though,” she said. “When you think about it. You and your heart. I guess I’ve always assumed it would be you who died first. Not that I wanted it that way, of course, but I’d been preparing myself, I think, for that eventuality.”

  “I don’t blame you. You’ve been through this before, after all.”

  “I guess your HeartNet is doing its job.”

  I’d long since had my device repaired and reconnected. What a leap of faith that would have been—to never have had it fixed again.

  “But who’s this woman?” Annie asked. “Have you ever met her?”

  “Never. Maybe she doesn’t even exist.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” she said, looking displeased. “She’s out there. Somewhere. Biding her time.”

  She managed to smile then.

  “I never think about her,” I said, which was mostly true. “I’m not, like, keeping an eye out for her, if that worries you.”

  “I’d hope not,” she said. “It’s not fun to think about, you being with someone else, but I’m not upset. It’s not wrong to move on. How can I fault you for that, right? Honestly, I’d want you to. I’d want you to be happy.”

  I wrapped my hand around her ankle. “Annie, I’m not going to be with someone else.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said, suddenly irritable. “Don’t pretend you don’t believe in it. You wouldn’t have given me the transcript unless you did.”

  “It’s not that I think it will necessarily come true. I just didn’t want to hide it from you.”

  She stared at me. “Jim. Please.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  We were both quiet for a few moments. She had William’s baby monitor in her hands. On the screen I could see him thrashing silently in his crib. He’d just woken up from his nap and soon he’d be wailing. Whether she would have handled the pregnancy differently, knowing what she now knew, I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.

  “The part about you and your father on the stairs,” she said. “It’s incredible. Do you really think it’s possible you were the one who grabbed his arm, that you somehow went back in time and touched him?”

  I’d devoted considerable thought to this over the last two years, and though I suspected that it was true, that I’d been responsible for what my father had seen on the stairs, I couldn’t prove it. It was just a feeling. When I told her this, Annie’s eyes got big.

  “Well, feelings matter,” she said confidently.

  She held up the monitor to look at William and weighed her left breast in the palm of her hand, preparing to go upstairs and nurse him.

  “If you do ever see her,” she said, “and I’m still on the scene, you’ll let me know, right?”

  It took me a few seconds to realize she was talking about the woman, my future wife.

  “If that’s what you want,” I said.

  “You promise me?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” She stood up to go; William was crying now. “Because there are probably some things I should tell her. Some things I should warn her about.�
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  I smiled. The sooner this could all become a joke, the better.

  —

  AND FOR A LONG TIME, it was exactly that. It was something we laughed about.

  If you think Wifey Number Two will put up with this, Annie would say after an argument, you’re kidding yourself.

  Out of necessity we had to move forward with our lives. There were diapers to change, fruits to puree, a baby to rock and get back to sleep in the middle of the night. There were visits to the heart specialist. There was a sump pump in need of constant repair. There were concerts, dinner parties, graduations. Band practices, bass lessons, new theater productions, fund-raisers, an uneasy dinner with a newly paroled convict who leaned across the table and told me, conspiratorially, that I was a lucky man. There were long winter days, black ice on the roads, cold feet under the sheets.

  There were beautiful spring mornings, the azalea bushes and pear trees blossoming pink and white up and down the street, the Blue Ridge Mountains hazy and beautiful out beyond the tree line, birds pepping the branches just outside the kitchen window, and the pollen all over everything: the grill lid, the glass table on the deck, the deck itself, the trash cans, the windshields, the mailbox, even our hair and clothes if we lingered too long in the driveway before diving into our cars for work.

  Too soon, Fisher left for college. She came home, of course, for long weekends and holidays, but William was only three when she moved out of the house, meaning we essentially raised him as an only child. He’s always looked up to Fisher. In some ways, she’s been more like an aunt to him than a sister.

  William was a contemplative boy, very private, very secretive, but also smart and practical. Truth be told, the older he gets, the more he reminds me of my father. He’s studying to be an engineer now at Chapel Hill and dating a girl from Phoenix.

  I still work for the bank, though in a different capacity. You won’t find too many human loan officers anymore. Most loan applications these days are either handled online by digital assistants or in person by intelligent Grammers, though we do keep a few human loan officers on hand across the state for the larger borrowers who prefer it that way and for those days when the computers are glitchy because of trouble with the servers or because the satellites are un-pingable up there in their geosynchronous orbits.

  Everywhere you go, nowadays, there are holograms, on the street, in your office, at the hospital, at your front door with once-in-a-lifetime offers for skin creams and patio furniture, and nobody is much amazed by them anymore. It’s easy to forget what it was like in the old days, when looking down the street, you could be sure that everyone you saw was flesh and blood.

  I remember when Fisher called home from college that first semester—she wound up at Georgetown—and informed us that she was taking upright bass lessons from an intelligent hologram that looked like Charles Mingus. I was astounded, but of course that’s fairly standard now at most universities, isn’t it? They are everywhere. They check our heart rates. They analyze our facial expressions and speech. They can read our moods. They call the police if we’ve been in an accident.

  They belong to us, and I suppose we belong to them, too. They are us.

  Only, no heaven for holograms, as Annie likes to say.

  Not as far as we know, goes my line.

  My father, Wes, Anthony, my uncle, Annie’s parents—will we meet again? I believe we will, in a way, but as for proof of that, I can only offer my story, nothing more. For people like me, however, for those who doubt anything they haven’t experienced personally, I suppose my story won’t offer much assurance.

  Despite the nondisclosure agreements we signed, Annie and I have told plenty of friends about Sally and her machine over the years, and I’ve always been surprised by how unsurprised people are to learn about it. Kurt and Kitra were visiting us in Shula one Christmas, and out at dinner one night Annie was telling them about the machine when Kurt nodded his head enthusiastically, meaning he wanted to interrupt. “Oh, I totally read about this,” he said. “In The New Yorker, I think.”

  “Yeah, I remember that, too,” Kitra said. “The Reunion Machine, it’s like a giant glass window, right? And you stand in front of it, and there’s this fog, and the person you want to talk to sort of appears there in the mist? That’s what you’re talking about, right?”

  “Well, maybe there’s a different one,” I said, trying to be polite.

  Sometimes, when we’d tell our friends about Sally and the Reunion Machine, they’d ask for her contact information, and typically we would oblige, though with a warning that the nature of the experience was unpredictable and physically arduous. Was it worth it? was the standard question we’d get, and to this we would answer, unequivocally, that it had been.

  For a couple of years we’d hear from Sally on occasion via email. She’d keep us updated on her progress testing and fine-tuning the machine. She was still collecting data, still analyzing, but always she’d mention vague plans for publication. Eventually, she said, the wider world would have to reckon with the machine, whatever it was, but until that time its existence was a not very well-kept secret.

  Then one day a friend, to whom we had provided Sally’s contact information, called to tell us that the number had been disconnected. When I tried it, I got the same result. As the weeks passed I began to wonder and went searching online. Very easily I found it, her obituary. She’d died, only sixty-two years old. There was no specific mention of the Reunion Machine, only that she’d retired to her hometown of Little Rock and “pursued her own scientific interests.” Curious to learn what was to become of her machine and her research, I thought to call Martin Strider, the man who’d funded the work. I had no trouble tracking him down. As far as I could tell his mind was sound.

  “I’m tearing down the Hobby Shoppe,” he told me.

  “But what about the machine? Will you move it somewhere?”

  “That’s getting torn down with it. It’s the way it needs to be. The machine was just too dangerous, and that’s the God honest truth. No way we ever could have marketed that thing.”

  “Why—did something happen?”

  “It killed her is what happened,” he said.

  “Killed Sally? How?”

  “Well, I never understood how it worked to begin with, so I’m not sure I could tell you how exactly, but it did. Maybe she used it too many times. It got to the point she was in there once or twice a week.”

  “Were you with her when it happened?”

  “I was. The doctor called it cardiac arrest, which probably it was, technically speaking, but before the doctor got there, she was sort of phasing in and out.”

  “Phasing?”

  “She was barely there. She was like a ghost.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t really believe it. I thought of Sally’s device to measure partial existence. I’d often wondered about it. Had I fully recovered? If I didn’t look where I was going as I was walking down the hall, would I pass cleanly through a wall? In a moment of mindlessness, would I slip right through the floor at work and land in the basement parking garage? Holding my hand up to the sunlight, I would inspect the outer fringes of my fingers, where the light burns orange through the skin, and wonder if I was any more transparent than the day before that. Not that transparency was necessarily an indication of nonexistence. I wasn’t sure what, really, would indicate such a thing. When I gripped my tennis racket, it stayed in my hand. When I swung it and hit the ball, the ball was propelled forward, outward, through the universe. I was capable of causing an effect, and this seemed significant to me.

  I was here—wasn’t I?

  Surely I was.

  “But Martin,” I said, “please tell me you saved her design? It needs to be studied.”

  “Her research is in a lockbox. She willed it to a university in Texas, but no one’s come to get it.”

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nbsp; “Don’t throw it away. That was important work she was doing. Even if it wasn’t safe, and even if it wasn’t going to make you any money, it was important. You have to understand that.”

  The phone clicked, and he was gone—and so was the machine.

  We were out to breakfast recently at a restaurant where a large group of White Hairs had shoved together half the tables and were talking loudly. The mood was jubilant, excited. They were there to celebrate the fortieth wedding anniversary of one of the couples with an old country breakfast. Scrambled eggs and bacon and canned peaches and grits and copious amounts of coffee were spread across the maze of tabletops. The honored husband and wife—a man in a pink polo shirt and blazer and a woman with gray close-cropped hair in a white linen tunic dress—sat at the head of the table, smiling pleasantly at all their friends.

  When the woman stood up to deliver a toast in honor of her husband and her speech slipped to the floor, he was the first one out of his chair, dropping to his hands and knees to retrieve it for her. He delivered it up into her reach and then held up his hands for the group to see. Covered in syrup, he said, smiling. His wife dunked her napkin in her ice water and began to wipe his palms clean.

  Annie and I, seated as we were in a nearby booth, watched all of this. Neither one of us commented on this display of affection, though I’m certain we were both thinking the same thing, that we were never going to be that couple. No fortieth for us. I tried to catch Annie’s eye, but she quickly returned her focus to the menu. She asked me what I was having. I slid my hand across the table, patted hers, and told her I was leaning toward the French toast with a side of cheese grits. She nodded. That sounded lovely to her.