by Melanie Tem
“Alone.”
She thought he’d say some platitude about how we all die alone, but to his credit he didn’t. “Yes,” he said, and she saw that his cheeks were wet. “Casey must know that. He’s no fool. He just wanted us to know what happened to him. He wanted me to know. I thank you.”
They were silent together for a while. Inez’s mind wandered as she imagined the Lost Astronaut wandering through endless space. After a while she thought she better bring herself back to earth, which was, after all, where she still lived. Almost coyly, she said to Mr. Eng, “You weren’t all that slow to accept what I had to say.”
“We’ve seen something like this before.”
“Really?” She found herself both pleased and disappointed that she might not be the only one after all.
“There are two hundred or so like you, registered. None, I believe, with your degree of control.”
She snorted. “I have no control at all.”
“We could register you, Inez, track your abilities. But I can’t honestly recommend it. I’ve told no one about you. Believe me, I think that’s for the best. And I must ask you not to tell anyone else about Casey. If you do, I’ll have to deny it.”
This was so like something out of an old movie that Inez actually laughed. “Lucky for you everybody would just think I’m a senile old woman.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. This is a secret I’ve been keeping all my life.”
“Thank you,” he said again.
They didn’t have anything more to say to each other. She could see that he didn’t know how to take his leave, so she helped him out. “I’m very tired,” she told him, which was true. “I’m afraid I have to rest now.”
Hours later when she awoke, a stack of mail was on her coffee table, alongside three newspapers in different colored plastic bags. Inez had long since given up trying to get the newspaper people to stop sending her the Sunday papers, but she had managed to get over feeling obligated to read them just because they appeared in her driveway. Whoever had brought them in, along with her mail, must have felt doubly good about doing her the favor, never mind that she’d rather have just let them accumulate out there than have to figure out something to do with them in here. Through the green and blue and orange bags—was there some sort of color code?—she didn’t see anything about Casey Liebler, just comics and ads.
She hardly ever got letters anymore; practically every letter-writer she’d known in her life was dead by now, or had switched to email. So Inez almost missed the small brown envelope with an actual postage stamp instead of a meter mark. There was no return address and she couldn’t read the postmark. The ridiculous fantasy flashed through her mind that it was from the Lost Astronaut. But when she opened it she saw that it was, almost as amazingly, from Daniel.
“Dear Grammy.” None of her other grandchildren called her that.
Once when I was a little kid Mom said something that I think means you’re the only one I can talk to about this. Maybe I didn’t understand what she said, or maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but do you sometimes have thoughts that aren’t yours? In languages you don’t know, or about things you couldn’t possibly know about? Because I do, I have for as long as I can remember, and it’s driving me crazy. Literally. The other day I got somebody else’s suicidal thoughts. I have never been suicidal in my entire life, but I got why it was attractive to whoever it was. And I’m getting drums, with some kind of chanting or calling in some weird language. Middle of the night, middle of class, walking down the street, hanging out with my girlfriend. This sucks. I tried to call you but kept getting a busy signal. Too bad you don’t have IM or texting or at least email, or even call waiting. Too bad we can’t just read each other’s minds when we want to, but I’ve never been able to do that, have you? Please write back.
Love, Daniel
After his signature were his address and phone number. Below that was what had to be—she smiled—his email address.
Stiff and off-balance, she tried to make sense of it. Had Donna known about her peculiarity, then? Who else knew? Was it obvious, like a deformity? Did she act funny without knowing it?
Then the important details of the letter started to come into focus. Daniel wasn’t dead. He hadn’t been toying with killing himself. He hadn’t been playing the drums, either. She’d evidently been picking up from his mind thoughts he’d picked up from somebody else’s mind. On top of everything else, this was just about more than she could take in.
Then there was the real shocker: Daniel was like her.
Rousing herself, she searched a little wildly through bedroom, bathroom, kitchen drawers for paper and a pen, finally settling for a sheet of purple gift wrap she’d smoothed and saved and a not very sharp pencil she found in with the pots and pans. The wrapping paper had a white underside. The pencil tore the paper a little but did make visible marks. Inez lowered herself onto a kitchen chair and pushed aside the bowl of overripe oranges and bananas, ignoring the cloud of fruit flies that went with it.
She began with “Dear Daniel” at the very top of the page, then moved way down to the bottom and wrote, “I love you, Grammy,” liking the look of it and the sound of it as she said it aloud. Then, whistling, she set about filling in the white space in between with her handwriting made cramped by Parkinson’s and blurry by the dull pencil.
It took her a long time because she wanted to say it right, and because both her concentration and her grip on the pencil kept slipping. Finally, though, she’d filled all the space available to her and done the best she could to tell him what she knew. Carefully folding and smoothing the purple paper, she slid it into an envelope from one of the pieces of junk mail, re-sealed it with Scotch tape, crossed out the address and replaced it with Daniel’s, crossed out the used postage and stuck on a stamp from the new book the shopper had bought for her. All this exhausted her, but she was determined to make the trek to the end of the driveway, put the letter in the mailbox and raise the flag before lying down again.
When she opened the door, Clarence Eng was standing there, carrying a cello case. “Oh,” they said at the same time. “Hello.” Suddenly aware of how unkempt she must look, Inez smoothed her hair.
“I thought you might like—I wanted to play for you.” Mr. Eng looked shy. “I wanted to play for Casey.”
It took her a moment, but when she understood what he meant her heart soared and her eyes filled with tears. “Please,” she said, stepping carefully onto the porch, “walk with me to the mailbox. My grandson is waiting for this letter. Then we’ll have ourselves a concert.”
He didn’t quite know what to do, so Inez took the lead, leaning lightly on his arm and directing him with her own movements around the potholes, newspapers, boxes, lawn chairs, tires. This might well be her last journey outside, and she was glad for the slow pace so she could savor the smell of the sunshine, the squawking of the jay, the bright yellow house across the street that had been gray the last time she’d noticed. For just a moment she thought of telling Mr. Eng that apparently Daniel was just like her, but she decided not to.
When they got to the top of the driveway he gallantly opened the mailbox for her while she laid Daniel’s letter inside, then closed it again. She raised the rusted metal flag.
By the time they got back to the house Inez was weak and profoundly fatigued. Gentleman that he was, Mr. Eng must have noticed, for he offered to postpone the cello concert until another day. But she could tell how much he wanted to play now, and she understood why the timing was so critical. “No, no,” she protested. “I want to hear the music,” and that was as true as anything she’d ever said or thought.
She lay on the couch and closed her eyes. Mr. Eng sat in her rocker with his cello between his thighs. There was silence. Then music like liquid chocolate poured into her living room and into her heart. At first she sang along, the melody vaguely familiar. But after a while she just let it be.
Far away, drifting farther, just at the edge of whe
re she would be able to reach him, the Lost Astronaut was hearing the music, because she was. Inez didn’t try to send it to him. She just made herself as open as she could and let it pass through her to him.
She floated into deep space. Soon he would drift beyond her ability to track him. Soon, she thought, she herself would drift beyond her ability to come back.
Thank you, in her mind, moving with the music, back and forth.
The music was sweet, and sad, but Inez could not think of it as elegiac, exactly. More, it was resolute, solemn in its understanding. Her face was cold and wet.
The sound of a single string, played solo within the wash of music, caught her attention. It rose and fell in pitch, singing in concert like prayer. It was a solitary thought, a nerve, a vein, a narrow thread of muscle.
While the body and the world disintegrated around it, it lingered a moment, then dissolved. Thank you.
BEES FROM THE HIVE
He’s remembering that first day at the new school, middle of fourth grade, agonizingly shy, overwhelmed by all the colors and sounds and motion and new people and new smells, crouched in a corner by the playground fence pretending to be interested in something on the ground but really just trying to control what he’d later learn to call sensory stimulation, when Molly called him over to where she was cross-legged on the ground peering and poking at something and writing things down in a green spiral notebook open on her blue-jeaned thigh. “What do you think?” she asked him right off, not even looking up.
He stood over her. The top of her head was velvety, very short brown hair. She had a gigantic bug in an open jar. Xavier flinched and tried not to make the noise he wanted to make. He hated bugs. All those legs, all that wriggling, the way they felt when they jumped on you or crawled down your back or flew into your mouth when you were riding your bike really fast. He didn’t want to look but he couldn’t take his eyes off her small square hands. Very carefully she pulled off one of the insect’s legs. There were so many of them he wouldn’t have known she’d already done this many times before if he hadn’t then seen a pile of legs like thread in another jar. He thought he was going to be sick. She wrote something in the notebook, and then tilted her head back to glance at him. “Isn’t this cool? I’m doing an experiment. I need an assistant.”
“I don’t—”
He has long since gotten used to hardly ever getting a whole sentence out before she grabs the conversation back. She didn’t care whether he thought it was cool. She, and only she, was the arbiter of cool. She was the arbiter of everything. If he’d fully understood earlier what that meant, things might have turned out different. Or maybe not. Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted them to.
That first day, in the first five minutes they knew each other, Molly stood up, taller than he was then and for quite a few years, and announced, “I almost died before I was born. I was in the hospital a really long time. And I almost died a bunch of times before I was six months old. Cool, huh?”
Not quite sure what to make of this introduction, but impressed, he sort of gulped and said, “Yeah.” He’s come to wonder whether these near-death experiences—assuming they’re true—made Molly what she is. Not that he really knows what she is. Molly is many things.
That morning in fourth grade, her expression made it clear she knew what she was doing and he certainly didn’t, which pretty much matched what he already thought. Her hands now in fists at her sides. He could hear her breathing, smell the sun on her blue cotton shirt. Even then, something about her solemn, unblinking stare made him a little afraid of her, more than a little smitten. Later he came to think of it, sometimes, as aggressive, sexually aggressive, “opposite sex” or “opposing sex.”
The way she kept brushing at her velvety hair was surprisingly wonderful. He kind of got lost for a little while in the rhythmic motion of her small hand and arm, the very soft swishing sound of her hair against her skin, the wafts of shampoo and sunny smells. He was almost nine; she would come to his birthday party—she would run his birthday party, override and charm his parents into taking the kids to the water park instead of the zoo because after all they were new in town and she’d lived there all her life so she knew what was best. Already he was hers.
“Hi, Xavier.” Her very clear voice saying his name, and pronouncing it right without a stupid “eks” sound in front of the “z” sound, gave him goosebumps. She told him her name. “You just moved into 432 Baker Avenue. The big white house with the red roof. You’ve got two cats.”
“Um, yeah.” She’d been watching him. That gave him the creeps and flattered him at the same time.
“Well, we’re going to be great friends, starting this minute,” she said, and finally blinked, and walked off carrying her notebook, telling him over her shoulder to bring the jars with the bug and the bug parts.
He did, and they were great friends from that moment on. Xavier couldn’t have exactly said why. Molly decided what TV shows and movies they saw, what video games they played, what they’d have for snacks, and the topic of pretty much every conversation. Never did she ask him what he wanted to do, although occasionally she did demand his opinion, which she used as an opportunity to explain to him how he had totally misunderstood things. Every thing she said he found utterly fascinating. He thought he could listen to her all day, and often he did.
Jillian became part of their group almost at the end of that fourth grade year. She’d been living in California with her aunt, was now to live here with her grandmother. According to Molly, she had strawberry-blonde hair; to Xavier it just looked light brown. He remembers how Molly approached Jillian her first day, the intensity of her posture, her determined nodding as she spoke. “Hey, I’m Molly. You’re Jillian. I almost died before I was born. Isn’t that cool? We’re going to be best friends.” Jillian looked a little stunned. It was his first out-of-body experience, watching himself watching them.
Shortly thereafter Molly declared the three of them a team. Xavier always thought Jillian was much more like Molly’s personal assistant than a friend. She ran her errands, carried her books, did the homework Molly considered beneath her. At least Xavier hadn’t had to do any of that. He’d had other uses.
“Can you move?”
Molly is above him, shouting into his face, her voice very loud and very clear. There is a halo of tree limbs behind her head, dark against the sun like blood vessels from her skull, maybe from her brain. He’s heard of tumors doing that, attaching themselves to veins and arteries so they have their very own blood supply. He can feel something scratchy against his neck and cheek, several hard things under his left thigh and shoulder blade, things warm and liquid which may or may not be part of him.
Coughing brings out new centers of pain. “I don’t know,” he manages to tell her, because it isn’t a good idea not to answer Molly. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, sure you can.” It’s been a long time since he bothered demanding why she asks him questions if she’s not going to believe his answers anyway. The fact is, she’s often right and he’s often wrong. “Just rest a second, then we’ll help you.”
Jillian’s face wedges in next to Molly’s, those sinister veins piercing her head now as if Molly shot them at her. Both faces and Jillian’s long curly light hair and the veins blot out the sky.
“Open your mouth.”
That’s Molly, giving orders. He’s afraid to open his mouth for her, afraid not to. He opens his mouth and something is pushed into it, hard and sticky, a piece of hard candy. It makes him choke a little, but that isn’t what interests her.
“Can you taste that?”
Desperately wanting to tell her the truth, he has some trouble sorting out his senses. “No,” he finally decides. “I can feel it but not taste it, I don’t think.”
“It’s hot cinnamon,” Jillian prompts.
“I can’t taste it.”
Molly puts her hand over his eyes and then something is passed under his nose. “Can you smell that?”
“It’s an orange.”
“Interesting,” she breathes, and removes her hand. Instantly he misses her touch.
Jillian is normally nervous and high-strung, but Xavier can’t remember a time she’s looked so scared. She covers her mouth with trembling fingers, her grandmother’s star sapphire ring sparking. Xavier thinks how old she looks. But wait, she’s only twenty-three, they’re only twenty-three. He’s lost some indescribable and immeasurable quantity of precious time. He’s floating. Before he floats totally outside his body he says, to one or the other or both of them, “You pushed me, didn’t you? You pushed me off the path?” It’s a question. You don’t make assertions to Molly.
Molly’s gasp is so unlike her that he guesses it’s fake. “Jesus, Xave, you’re not fucking serious.” Then, to Jillian, “He must have really smashed his head.”
Jillian just nods, her hand still over her mouth and still shaking, the ring quiet and dull now. Xavier focuses on the trembling of her hand, on the hand itself, on the ring, and floats away on it.
“Xavier. Hey, Xave.” He’s at home now, in his own bed, alone in his own bed, which is rare. Some Tindersticks song is playing through the speakers, looping back over itself. Jillian made that track for him. Jillian is beside him, her familiar sunny smell, her familiar nervous voice and the star sapphire ring, the unfamiliar sensation of something nudging at his lips. “You haven’t had anything to eat in like twenty-four hours. Will you eat some yogurt? For me?”
The spoon taps at his mouth again and his lips open. He feels the yogurt slide in, thinks of all the crass jokes they’ve made about yogurt, welcomes the feel of it in his mouth and on his tongue, but doesn’t taste it. “What kind?” he asks, sort of urgently.
It takes her a minute to get what he wants to know. “Oh. Uh-—strawberry banana, it says. I think we’ve got some plain, too, if you—”
“I can’t taste it.”
“Oh,” she says. “Bummer. Something happened when you fell, I guess. That’s what Molly thinks.”