It’s not so much the afterlife that concerns me these days, but the next few years. We’re in our late fifties now, pushing sixty, and I can feel our time here together running out. I can’t be sure when it will happen, or how, but one day I will wake up in a world without Annie.
It’s not something we often talk about anymore.
I haven’t even told her about something that happened a couple of weeks ago, when, during my lunch hour, I was waiting for an oil change down the street from the bank and a tall woman with short blond hair came into the waiting room and sat down in a chair across from me with a magazine. I recognized her immediately. One of the mechanics entered the room to pour himself some coffee and scratch his ass in plain view, and the woman glanced over at me, widened her eyes, and smiled furtively. I didn’t dare return her smile. Even to make eye contact with this woman seemed to me like a deep transgression.
I tried not to stare. I didn’t want to know her name or where she was from. I didn’t want to know anything about her, but then the mechanic, the ass-scratcher, turned to her and said, “We almost got your Mazda ready, Mrs. Trout, just a few more minutes.” Trout—did I know any Trouts in town? I tried to erase the name from my memory. Pretending to take a phone call, I went outside to stand alone in the parking lot. To engage with this woman at all, to learn anything more about her, I feared, might have dire consequences. Maybe even just learning her last name had already set off a series of events that I couldn’t control.
I’d promised to tell Annie if I ever saw this woman, but I will admit now that it is a promise I have not kept. I haven’t mentioned this woman to her. I can’t bear to bring it up.
I do take some solace in the knowledge that Annie and I will probably meet again one day, of course I do, but at the same time, I often worry that our ability to interact and love each other on the other side will be limited in crucial ways. There is a certain gulf between souls, I think, that can only be bridged with cells, with blood—with matter. I think of Annie, in the doorway of our hotel room in Little Rock, wrapping me up in her arms, receiving me.
Two hands, clapped.
Moments like these, I suspect, are why we give up being echoes, give up being ideas, why we dare to assume a physical form and brave a world such as ours, so full of tragedy and fear and pain, murders and rapes, war, ceaseless brutality and conflict. We wouldn’t subject ourselves to this unless it was worth it, on some level.
We are here for the heat. For the friction. For the difficult mess. Easy for me to say, I suppose, since I’ve lived a life of relative comfort. I understand and appreciate this fact, I really do.
Yesterday, a Saturday, I went on a long walk through Shula. I passed the dog park, where people sat quietly on picnic tables in sweatpants and yoga tights, staring at their phones while their dogs became better acquainted. Near the corner an older gentleman with a large gray beard played songs on his guitar. Bob Dylan, I realized as I approached. A Grammer. He was here, on this street corner, and undoubtedly on a dozen others at that very moment, all over town, to promote an upcoming concert tour.
I walked by my bank, past the parking garage where once upon a time I’d almost died, along the streets I’ve known all my life. I’m not sure I understood where I was going until I was nearly downtown. By this point, I’d walked almost three miles. Two kids on skateboards zoomed by me and nearly knocked me sideways—both real, I think. Three joggers singing the theme song for some new television show ran into me, vaporous, and continued on their way. A frog-like woman with a sandwich board swiped her hand through my chest as she tried to lure me into a restaurant. It’s often difficult to suss out the Grammers from the Actuals. People don’t like to leave their homes anymore, and some cities, I’m told, have taken to beaming in Grammers to maintain the illusion of activity and commerce. Go for a walk downtown and probably a third of the people you see on the streets really aren’t there.
Sweaty and exhausted, I texted Annie and asked her to please come pick me up.
I was at the edge of Shula’s historic district now, among the older houses. Every year, it seemed, the city was reinventing itself for a new future. On the next block a major construction project was under way, and half the homes on one side of the street had been torn down to make room for a development. Annie and I had been watching this project unfold for some time with interest.
The Lennox home had been razed, along with four adjacent houses, to make way—this, according to a billboard—for a multi-use building of shops and high-end apartments. On the other side of the perimeter fence that kept pedestrians from tumbling down into the site was a deep orange hole that the bulldozers had ripped open in the earth.
It is the nature of my job to sometimes visit construction sites such as this one, and so I know well how easy it is to demolish a house, and I’m aware how silly it is to mourn wood, concrete, and plaster. And yet I’d been sad to learn that the city had approved this project, had approved the plan to obliterate this piece of Shula’s history. No one had consulted me, of course. I had no voice in such matters. The future no longer belonged to me or Annie.
It was late afternoon now, almost evening, and the construction crew had called it quits for the day. I walked the fence line until I came to a small gap, where I managed to squeeze through, snagging my shirt, ripping a small hole. I was wearing khakis and a dress shirt, so I did my best to look official, like I was supposed to be here. I walked down a long dirt ramp, and soon I was at the squishy bottom, surrounded by long lengths of bundled rebar and unburied drainage tubes, the mud squelching up over the ramparts of my shoes.
I tried to approximate where the staircase had been, and once I was on the spot, stood there and gazed up to the street where pedestrians—White Hairs, Grammers, children—were strolling by on the sidewalk. Nobody was paying me any attention. I was probably twelve feet below them, looking up at a sheer wall of caked red earth. Behind me lurked the heavy machinery, Bobcats and cranes, idle at the bottom of the pit that they had helped to create. A few feet away, I saw that a small porcelain shard had been loosed from the earth. A blue-and-white triangle—from a plate perhaps. Clara’s wedding china? It seemed possible. Soon it would be shoveled under with everything else, covered with foundation concrete. Large rocks protruded from the mud in places. Scraped stones. Bedrock.
I closed my eyes. I could feel my heartbeat confusing itself, whirling in my chest. My breath was uneven. It had been years since my last anxiety attack, and I’d forgotten the overwhelming sense of helplessness that shrilled up through you, that wimbling dread that, whatever this was, you’d have to face it alone, that you were on your own.
Then, warm and firm, her hand at my neck: I could feel the contact of each finger, the bulb of her thumb, a nail’s hard edge. Next, the heat of her voice in my ear: What was I doing down here? Wasn’t I ready to go home? Already my heart was sliding back into an even beat. I was going to be all right. I opened my eyes, and, thank God, there she was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my early readers, Leslie Cayce, Reed Johnson, John Lane; to my editor, Laura Perciasepe, for every single note and question and conversation; to Katie Freeman, Jynne Martin, Geoffrey Kloske, and all the other amazing folks at Riverhead; to my agent, Jin Auh, for keeping the faith through all 72,000 iterations of this book; to her assistant, Jessica Friedman, and everyone else at the Wylie Agency; to my friends, my parents, my family; to Catherine, Eleanor, and Juniper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Andrew Owen
Thomas Pierce was born and raised in South Carolina. He is the author of the collection Hall of Small Mammals and his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, VQR, Oxford American, and elsewhere. A recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, he is a graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program. Pierce lives in Virginia with his wife and daughters.
piercethomas.com
/> thomaspierce
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
The Afterlives Page 32