by Hal Ackerman
Matthew carried the shoebox tucked under his arm like a football. He nodded toward a door indented into an adjacent hallway. Its signage read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Your plan is to get us arrested?”
Matt circled his palm over her head. “I hereby authorize you. You are now authorized personnel. And in that capacity you are hereby empowered to authorize me.”
Duly authorized, they opened the door and slipped inside. It was like being backstage at a scene shop. There were partially staged dioramas, with models that were discarded or were in progress, painted in the surreal pigments that that didn’t exist anywhere in Nature. The walls were lined with shelves of sculpted human faces. No two looked alike. Adults and children, elders and newborns. Generations of families who had never lived, fashioned from an artist’s imagination. Their expressions were alive, ready to be placed into situations that engendered those responses of fear, contentment, love.
The working artist’s back was bent over her workbench at the far end of the room. She did not look up from her labors. “Can I help you?” She did not make the word “help” sound like an intrusion but a pleasant possibility.
“Did you make these?” Angie asked.
“The boys sometimes throw a Picasso in the midst of everything just to mess with me. Do you see any Picassos?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then they’re all mine.” When she swiveled around to face them, they saw that she was blind. She did not wear dark glasses. Her eyes looked like broken eggshells. She was pretty. Probably in her mid-thirties. Slender. Short dark hair. She wore a lab coat over a long-sleeved striped pullover. Her nametag read DR. MARGARET DITTEMORE. In letters and in Braille.
“I never thought of blind people smiling,” Angie said.
“I never thought of sighted people blurting out every random thought that came into their heads.”
“It’s okay. We’re authorized,” said Matt.
“Yes, I thought there were two of you.”
Matt strode boldly toward her. “We need you to put a face on this.”
He placed the skull into her hands. They were like no hands Angie or Matt had ever seen, appendages of a species whose brain and central nervous system had migrated into their fingers. The hands engulfed the skull, touching every molecule of its surface.
“Aquiline nose. Long aristocratic neck. Poetic chin. Probably Spanish aristocracy.”
Angie was practically trembling.
“You can tell all that already?” Matt asked.
“My fingers have eyes.”
“Could you make the face for us by tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow night? How about in three weeks?”
“It’s an anniversary gift for Lucy Bancroft,” said Matt in that quiet voice of his that always managed to penetrate without opposition. His utterance of the Bancroft name changed everything. Dr. Dittemore embraced the skull once again. The Bancrofts had essentially built this lab for her, she said, with the funding they provided the museum. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for them. She rolled her chair across the room and placed the skull on a pedestal.
“Are you going to their party?” she asked them as the skull was rotated and digitally photographed from three hundred and sixty angles.
“That’s the plan,” said Matt, careful not to lie.
“Have you been to the Family Farms Ranch before?”
“You mean … where the party is?”
“I heard Barry Brickman’s parties are to die for.”
The computer beeped, signaling that all the images had been processed. Margaret’s attention left the kids and went fully to the apparatus. They watched the images become digested, amalgamated, and projected onto a computer screen. It assumed layers, features, and before their astonished eyes, took on a lifelike face.
“Of course a ten-terabyte database, CGI, and DNA recognition programs help,” Dittemore said, “but the human soul can only be seen by another human soul.”
Her fingers seemed to grasp and penetrate the screen, to move into the contours of the face, pressure here, elongation there. The subtlest of gestures created an astonishing effect, giving life to this lifelike face. History. Backstory in the eyes, not merely a momentary expression.
“Oh, my God.” Angie was about to faint. “He’s gorgeous.”
“Is that really what he looks like?” Matt asked.
“You’re asking the wrong girl,” said Margaret.
***
Night had fallen as they drove back to Lila’s. Angie checked her cell for messages and snapped it shut. Nothing from her father. Nothing from Lila. The plan was to come back to the museum in the morning for the finished product. They had successfully gleaned that the party would be held at the estate of one of the Bancrofts’ fabulously wealthy friends, a fellow philanthropist and captain of industry who, like the Bancrofts, had endowed hospitals and culture centers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“You tired?” Matt asked. “I could go over to Pico and bring some food back.”
“You were cool back there.”
“Yeah … blind chicks dig me.”
She leaned over and kissed him somewhere around the ear and cheek. He hadn’t been to the ocean in days but his skin had absorbed the scent of sea and salt and suntan oil. “You’re not gay, are you?” she said.
“I’m going to get the food. We’ll talk about this when I get back.”
She said okay and went into the house. The lights downstairs were off. A light was on upstairs. There were sounds from the second floor. Gigantic relief that he was back mixed with anger that no one had bothered to call to tell her.
“Dad?” She called tentatively. There was no reply. She started up the staircase. She was at the first curve when the second-floor bathroom door opened. She had a perfect vantage point from below. Lila’s tanned and toned body, her hair wet and lustrous, completely naked, padded out of the bathroom. Angie averted her eyes. She did not want to see her father naked. Immediately behind Lila, flicking her naked butt with a towel was not Stein, but Matthew’s Uncle Richard.
Angie gasped and bolted from the house unseen, her gagging and choked tears unheard.
Chapter Fourteen
The afterlife was not at all what Stein had expected. He had never believed in the afterlife, so any version of it would have surprised him. But this was disappointing. It confirmed what Shmooie the Buddhist had always said: that whatever you think will happen next, it will always be something else. There were clouds. He could tell that. And he was suspended among them. He could tell that too. He was surprised to realize he still called them clouds, the word by which his mortal brain had been taught to define them. If he had any vision of reincarnation at all, it featured a cosmic car wash where high-pressure hoses scrubbed clean the crevasses of memory, washing out every chunk and gristle of experience from the psyche before it was reinserted into a new body. He should not remember clouds. Or Shmooie the Buddhist. His first response was panic, like when the anesthesia wears off while you’re still on the operating table and your body wants to cry out to the doctors, Put me back under, but nightmarishly you have no power of speech.
Unless.
Geniuses were people whose reincarnated souls inadvertently retained some past-life knowledge the steam cleaning had missed. He thought it might be a nice change this next time around to have a head start instead of constantly playing catch-up. That glee was quickly tempered by anxiety that having an advantage might create complacency and make him vote Republican. But that might be fun too, he thought, seeing how the other half lived. To wear pressed shirts and have a cute, dutiful wife and obedient children named Ashley and Skipper.
His field of vision was narrow. Acuity wavered from unfocused to blurrier. He attempted to reorient himself but had the sensation of being tethered. This puzzled him. If he no longer had a body, how could he be constrained? That he had retained possession of the power of thought no longer surprised him. But he
sensed no dazzling new clarity nor perspective. His mind felt no less limited, no less confined than his body did. And damn it! He felt pain.
The sole unifying premise consistent with every version of the afterlife he had ever heard was the cessation of physical pain. How could nobody have gotten it right except the Evangelicals, who had predicted a horrific eternal life for nonbelievers like him? He was consumed by a wave of dread where he envisioned an eternity in which every single thing he ever believed was wrong. Where greed was rewarded, ignorance celebrated, generosity exploited, idealism shunned. Wait a minute—that was the world he had just come from.
He heard a voice from a great distance announcing his arrival most likely at a way station where he assumed he was to be processed. “He’s here,” were the word-like sounds. It gave Stein some reassurance to understand that he was so specifically expected, his name did not have to be mentioned. He knew he was powerless to alter or avert whatever was meant to happen next. Struggle would be futile. What would be the point of trying to rush through eternity? There would always be more of it. It felt sweet to surrender his will. He had to just let it be. That three-word phrase resonated through some hidden recess of memory and took on melody. Oh no, he groaned. Paul was the enlightened one? Not John? “Let It Be,” yes? “Imagine,” no?
What was the joke here? That the afterlife was the same as your regular life but without the friends and gadgets? He had a vision of his gravesite, of Lila watching his coffin being lowered into the earth. He felt her loss at the pit of his stomach. What would it do to her, losing yet another love of her life? Then he thought of Angie. He dared not imagine the expression on her face, her unbearable pain of loss. Or worse. The sad, knowing shake of her head, signaling that if there was a way to fuck up, her father would find it.
Whoever had been alerted to Stein’s imminent arrival now loomed into his field of vision. The features that in life had been called a face looked down at him from a pedestal of what used to be called a body, adorned in what in life had been called clothing. This had to be some sort of transitional place, he rationalized, the same idea behind divers not coming up too fast lest they get the bends or rapture of the deep.
But this particular face and body—slight build; buck teeth; furtive, darting brown eyes; olive skin—belonged to a person Stein had known in high school and had not thought of once in thirty years. Except that he had the crazy déjà vu feeling that he had just seen him. How weird that he of all people would be Stein’s welcomer?
“Barry Brickman?” Stein blurted out the words, as if he still had the physical mechanism with which to make utterance.
“Harry Stein,” the face answered. “Isn’t this ironic?”
There’s irony in the afterlife, Stein mused. Okay, that was good news.
Over the next several minutes, Stein’s operating system came back online in stages, revealing to him that:
A) This was not the afterlife.
B) He was not dead.
C) He was in a helicopter.
D) The tethers he felt attached to his body were intravenous lines feeding him glucose, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and saline.
E) He had been found in a remote corner of the Family Farm Ranch; a 911 call had been made by an anonymous guardian angel. He had been airlifted to the ER where a significant volume of apian venom had been extracted from his blood. His system had remarkable resistance, because the dosage could have been lethal, but he had only suffered minimal damage.
And finally, F) that this talking hologram hallucination of Barry Brickman was neither hollow nor hallow, but the actual corporeal, substantive, self-same Barry Brickman he had known in West Fremont High School. Barry Brickman who had been a sycophant, who desperately tried to compete with Stein for laughs, but who was just not funny. The same Barry Brickman who, Stein now learned, owned the helicopter in which they were flying—and the hundred-thousand-plus acres of flourishing almond, pistachio, and citrus groves over which they had been flying, and the helipad upon which they now alighted, nestled like an aerie atop his sixty-seven-room replica of Xanadu.
The lawn was the size of Yankee Stadium. Three concentric circles of exotic flowering plants orbited around a magnificent fountain. A marble statue of Napoleon on horseback commanded one end, facing a life-sized bronze replica of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky on the other. The helipad retracted down through a glass-enclosed elevator and deposited the helicopter gently onto a manicured lawn. A scrum of attendants materialized as the flaps of the aircraft opened. They assisted their employer, who in turn offered a helping hand to Stein. The combination of drugs and a diuretic flushing of Lasix had purged his body of the apian venom and its deleterious effects. He felt his body strength returning.
“What is this place?” asked Stein.
Brickman lowered his eyes, affecting a level of false humility previously only attained by Barbra Streisand. “Welcome to my home,” he said. Horses were being unloaded from vans and led past them by hot walkers from Hooters. Blinders and ornamental hoods resembling medieval heraldry were being fitted to them. “I’m throwing a little anniversary party for a few friends,” Brickman explained.
Through the fog, Stein was beginning to understand that Brickman had saved his life. “Listen. Barry. Thanks, man.”
“It was my pleasure … to see you disabled,” Brickman quipped. He had the same high-pitched laugh at his own jokes that he did in high school. “But now that we’re talking honestly, may I ask why you were trespassing on my land?”
Stein agreed that it was a pertinent question but unfortunately the fog surrounding the answer had not yet cleared.
“It’ll come,” Brickman assured him and conducted Stein inside through a dining room that looked like the Hall of Hrothgar. In its center was a massive oak table at which boar and flagons of ale might be served to boisterous knights. The décor of the adjacent alcove resembled a 1950s ice cream parlor. Brickman went on like a tour guide; they sat on a banquette around a Formica table. “Remember Rumplemyers? When they went out of business, I bought all their booths. At least I think it was after they went out of business.” Laugh laugh. A waitress in a ruffled pink skirt and a round-necked blouse asked if they’d like a menu or if they knew what they wanted. Brickman gave her a sexy wink and said she knew what he wanted. She laughed and squeezed his arm.
“And you, sir?” she said to Stein.
Stein’s memory processor was churning. Missing memory pieces floated down through the snow globe landscape of his mind. They settled into the empty spaces and completed the picture. Stein’s last retained image reappeared on his retina: a figure dressed as a spaceman standing stoically at the edge of the glade, smoke rising around his veiled visor, watching the disaster unfold like a vengeful God.
“Henny Spector,” Stein croaked.
The girl checked the menu for the name of a sundae she might have missed.
Stein wrapped his face in his hands and watched the scene of his near death play out inside his lids. “Arrest Henny Spector,” he said.
Brickman laughed. “That’s very funny. You haven’t lost your touch.”
“I’m serious. Do you know who Henny Spector is?”
“I know what he is,” said Brickman. “What he is, is dead.”
“Henny Spector is dead? Is that what you’re saying? How is he dead? When?”
A new voice interjected from an adjacent room. “I’m disappointed you didn’t ask who did it?” The source of that voice, the formidable Captain Anthony Caravaggio, filled the door frame.
“What in the hell is going on here?” Stein asked anyone who would answer. And specifically to Caravaggio, “Why do you care if I asked ‘who’?”
“Because ‘who’ would have told me you knew he was murdered.”
“Henny Spector was murdered?”
“You can ease off the amazement,” Brickman said. “He believes you.” He sounded a little disappointed.
“Did the bees get him?” he asked.
“A spike through the back of the head,” said Caravaggio.
“You told me it was a knitting needle,” Brickman charged.
“I said it was like a knitting needle. A long, thin steel cylinder with a sharp point at one end. Came out right through his eyeball.”
“Jesus. Somebody really didn’t like him.”
“That narrows it down to pretty much everybody,” Caravaggio said, just the way a cop would say it.
“Right through the mask?” Stein asked.
Caravaggio gave Stein a long, penetrating stare. “What mask are you talking about?”
“The mask. The head thing.” He made a haphazard gesture that was meant to convey what he meant. “He was wearing a bee suit.”
Brickman looked darkly at Caravaggio. “You told me he died stark naked.”
“He did die stark naked. Anyway that was the way we found him.”
“He was wearing a bee suit last time I saw him.”
“Maybe you better tell us what the hell you were doing there with him.” Caravaggio’s order opened a portal through which another meteorite of memory splattered itself over the surface of Stein’s brain. His family.
“Barry. I’ve got to use your phone.”
Caravaggio left to check out Stein’s story at the morgue. Brickman led Stein to a phone.
***
Mercedes answered, and when she heard Stein’s voice, called out, “Miss Leela!”
Lila stood there paralyzed.
The previous night after seeing Lila and Richard, Angie had bolted blindly out of the house. When Matthew returned with sandwiches he found Angie kneeling on the front yard dry heaving. He ran to her. Embraced her shoulders. “What is it? What happened?”
She shuddered his arms off her in a violent spasm.
“Angie, what is it?”
“Let’s just say your Aunt Lila and your Uncle Richard are more than kissing cousins.”
She expected an explosion of outrage and disgust from Matthew. But his response was low key and thoughtful, resigned and almost nostalgic. It was kind of an open secret that the two of them got together when Richard came to the mainland, maybe once or twice a year. It was no big deal, he said. It had been going on for years. Completely misreading her smile, he thought that his explanation had made it all right.