The Other Side of Death

by Judith Van GIeson

  “A vet or maybe work in a zoo. Ci says I’ve got some karma to work out with animals.”

  “Dolby does the yard work around here,” she said. “Excuse us for a minute. I want to take a look at what he’s done.”

  “See ya,” Dolby said.

  “ ‘Bye,” I replied.

  Ci put on some Birkenstock sandals she kept by the front door and they went out. I waited, watching a purple Wandering Jew in the sunroom wander an inch further, wishing the cat would come back. “Psst, Como,” I whispered, but there was no response. Wherever he’d gone, he was staying put. I heard the sound of voices but not words. A door slammed, a car left. I picked up a lavender pillow, put it down. Ci came back alone, took her sandals off, walked barefoot across the rug.

  “How’d he do?” I asked.

  “Good,” Ci said. “Dolby is a Virgo and can do very meticulous work. He hates to get his hands dirty. This is a pivotal incarnation for him with a lot of karma to work out. He’s moved a lot and has had difficulty establishing relationships with people his own age. Somewhere along the way he picked up a conventionally religious mind-set that I am trying to break him out of.” It sounded like therapy to me, but I suppose forward life progressions are a therapy of sorts. Even getting someone to listen to you is therapy these days. “Not to change the subject, but would you like to visit the skyviewer while you’re here?”

  “What’s a skyviewer?”

  “A sculpture made by an artist I know. I have one out back.” Along with the hot tub and the Jacuzzi, probably. “It’s a way of looking at a consistent source of light—the sky—until it changes your perceptions.”

  “You can just walk outside and look at the sky, can’t you?” I asked. We were in New Mexico, after all, where the sky speaks loud and clear and often.

  “It has a different effect when it’s framed. The skyviewer brings the sky down to you. I consider it a sculpture, but the zoning board considered it a building and you wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get a permit. They even dictated what kind of lights we could use inside. Architectural fascism, if you ask me.”

  Architectural fascism, architectural anarchy, it was hard to tell what you were going to get in this city. They’d nail you for lights in a skyviewer or lavender trim and let an extravagantly large and ugly building go by. “You just sit in this thing and look at the sky?” I asked.

  “Yes, but the lighting and the framing change the way you see it. In the daytime you can’t see the stars because the sun is out and the sky is too bright, but when it gets dark you can, unless you are in a lit space looking out, then all you see is black. You see incredible colors in the skyviewer, colors that don’t exist in art or in nature, colors that exist only in the eye and the mind. Lonnie was into color, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “She loved the skyviewer. I think it’s something she’d want you to experience. Will you do it?”

  “All right,” I said.

  The skyviewer was built into and on top of a pyramid-shaped mound out back. The entry was cut into the side of the pyramid, and it was framed by a stucco wall. A rectangular box a couple of feet high stood on top of the pyramid. To me it looked like a combination of a Pueblo Indian kiva and a small Mayan temple. The dirt all around it was patterned with the hieroglyphics of running shoes, but none that I recognized. “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Just go inside,” said Ci. “Sit down, stand up, whatever you feel like doing.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “As long as you want it to,” she said. “I usually stay until dark. I’ll be inside. Come and share your experience with me before you go.”

  I walked down a crunchy gravel path, through the side of the pyramid, and I had the sense of entering a ruin, although the building was new. It had been a while since I’d plunked myself down in a ruin and waited to see what happened; I wondered if I was still up to it. The inside of the skyviewer was rectangular, maybe fifteen feet high, with a low bench all around to sit on. A few feet above head level there was a circle of artificial light. Several feet above that was the rectangular ceiling, about twelve feet by ten. A parallel rectangle had been cut out a few feet into the ceiling and it was open to the sky. It was hard to tell what the ceiling was made out of—metal, maybe. It had a sharp edge. The artist who designed it obviously understood the power of proportion. The sky viewer had the pleasing symmetry of an indigenous structure.

  Through the entry passage I could see the sky and through the cut-out ceiling I could also see the sky, but they weren’t the same. The entryway’s was pale and washed out, an Eastern sky. The ceiling sky was true Western blue. It had to be the lights and framing that made the difference. The interior of the skyviewer was whitewashed like a Greek or Mediterranean building, but at that point it had a diffuse kind of mauvish glow.

  The sky slowly deepened and the walls did, too, until they became the color of adobe. The elbow of the adobe-colored ceiling against the sky was Georgia O’Keeffe in color and shape. The sky got bluer, and I had the sensation that I was peering into a box and could see the angle inside where the corners met. I looked away and when I looked up again the sky had entered the room like Ci had said it would. It overlapped the edges of the ceiling and was an overwhelmingly beautiful high-altitude blue. The color was deepest at the corners. You couldn’t see anything in it but color—no clouds, no planes, just blue. I wondered if you peeled away a corner of the blue ceiling, what you would find beyond it, pure business, pure white?

  I was experiencing the significance of visual distortion, a clear-headed hallucination, so clear that I could be in it and watch myself in it at the same time. The sky got deeper until it became the richest, most incredible blue, the color of ecstasy, the color of choice. I could have spent a lifetime in it, easily. You’d think a New Mexican would know all there was to know about blue, but I’d never seen color like this.

  It turned to indigo. The indigo closed in and became black, but not a pure black, a black with reds and purples in it. The walls turned white again, the harsh white of artificial light. Eventually the sky got completely and totally black, black velvet, the kind that people paint pictures of snarling tigers, bleeding Jesuses and Elvis Presley on.

  The stars came out and it was over. The twinkling lights gave the sky depth and spoiled the illusion. It was just a sky again filled with orbiting and spinning bodies. I left the skyviewer with the clear, pure feeling of having had an all-natural mind-altering experience.

  The lights were on in Ci’s kitchen and I went in. She was cutting up carrots and throwing them in a pot. Como was curled in a chair purring. “Well?” Ci asked.

  “It was beautiful,” I said.

  “You’ve never seen colors like that before anywhere, have you?”

  “No.”

  “The mind-altering, ecstatic experience—that’s what some people live for.”

  “I hope that’s not what Lonnie died for,” I said.

  Ci smiled, picked Como up and rested her chin on his head. “Death?” she asked. “What’s death anyway, but a necessary transition, the ultimate altered state.”

  14

  THE NEXT MORNING I made myself a Red Zinger when I got to the office and tried not to listen while Anna and Brink argued about what they wanted for breakfast. Brink wanted an Egg McMuffin while Anna was leaning toward a cinnamon raisin bagel. Since it was ten o’clock it seemed like the breakfast issue should have been settled before now. I shut my door, opened the New Mexican and caught up on the Santa Fe crime scene. The City Different is a mecca for artists, rip-off and otherwise. I went first to the “Police Notes,” where I found this: “A New York man and his 31-year-old daughter traveling through the area got in an argument in a Santa Fe restaurant Monday. The man reportedly gave his daughter $50 and told her to ‘hit the road.’ She did and has not been seen since.”

  The “Police Notes” are the minor crimes: the robberies, the threats and arguments where no one gets hurt. When
rapes, beatings and murders are involved the stories move onto page one, at least for a little while. Lonnie’s death had had its brief moment on the front page and now it was out of the newspaper altogether, unsolved, uninvestigated by anyone but me. I’d been talking to everyone who’d been connected with her, except that her two best friends were Jamie and Tim and I hadn’t talked to them yet. I picked up the phone and dialed the number. Tim answered, Jamie was in her studio making pots. He told me he was giving a poetry reading that night and I agreed to come.

  I took the shorter route to Dolendo and didn’t see any peregrinos along the way. I-25 is the pilgrim path. It had been a while since I’d been to a poetry reading—about fifteen years. Tim’s used to be raucous affairs with his friends drinking and cheering him on, making the Irish connection between words and drink. In San Miguel they had readings all the time. Except for MGM epics at the movie theater and the revolving bed antics of the gringos, there wasn’t much else going on. The readings were never held on Monday nights, however, because Alcoholics Anonymous met then and too many of the writers in town were members.

  This reading was to be at Babe’s on Canyon Road, a bar and restaurant filled with plants. On Tuesday nights they encouraged anyone who wanted to to perform. No doubt Tim had something to say about life and death, but I wasn’t expecting it to be raucous—sober and sad would be more like it. You feel an obligation to be happy in New Mexico with nothing around you but space and beauty and sunshine. If you can’t feel good in such a beautiful place, then where can you? When you’re down it’s easy to sink into a dark pit, like an underground parking lot that’s all the darker in contrast to the light; you can’t help but hate yourself for falling in. Where it’s gray all the time, you have gray ups and cloudy downs, but here there’s light and there’s dark, not much in between.

  I turned at the Adobe of God and went up the rutted road past the cemetery, wishing the Darmers had buried Lonnie in there the way people who died prematurely used to be buried under a tombstone shaped like a tree stump with the limbs cut off, the symbol of someone who died young. Anyone who went by it would know right away that the life had been short and the death sad.

  Foxy Lady came out to meet me in the Malones’ driveway wagging her long, red tail. “Hey, Foxy,” I said. She’d miss not having her own cemetery to root around in in Ohio. As Tim said, living here was like being in the middle of a religious experience. I could see why you might not want to do it all the time. I could also see the appeal of a house in the green and gray Midwest (for a while anyway), but you wouldn’t want to give Dolendo up forever either. They were renting, after all, not selling. As Foxy and I walked toward the door, I heard Tim and Jamie yelling at each other with that instinct for the throat that comes from long years of marriage.

  “You’re a fucking stone wall,” yelled Jamie.

  “You’re paranoid,” answered Tim.

  I pounded on the door and listened to what sounded like embarrassed silence from the other side. Foxy Lady wagged her tail. When Jamie opened the door her expression was calm, as if she’d taken a hand and wiped the angry away. “Good to see you, Neil. Come on in.”

  Red mud had gotten stuck in the cleats of my running shoes and some of it fell out in clumps on the newly sanded and polyurethaned floor, unwelcome as roaches in Jamie’s immaculately renovated house.

  “Neil,” she said, “would you mind? We always take our shoes off now that we have the new floors. I let people wear theirs at the party because there were so many people it would have been impossible to keep track of the shoes, but now I’m asking everybody to take them off.”

  I sat down on a bench, undid my laces and dropped my shoes to the floor next to a pile of boots and assorted footgear, near a pair of Adidas running shoes even muddier than mine.

  Jamie and I padded toward the kitchen across a floor whose hard, slick finish reminded me of proms and basketball games, corsages and sweat. “How ’bout a soda?” asked Jamie. “We don’t keep hard stuff in the house anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “Cream? Raspberry?”

  “Cream.”

  Jamie took two out of the refrigerator, twisted the caps off and we sat down to drink them. Her hair fell across her face as she leaned over to sip at her soda. “Neil, I … um … I have a confession to make,” she said. I waited. “I was the trickster.”

  “The trickster?”

  “You know, Tricky Dick at Rick’s party. I escorted you to the door.”

  “That was you? I didn’t recognize the voice.”

  “Stop the Ugly,” she said in a jowly Nixon mumble.

  “I hope you will stop it, Jamie. That building sucks.”

  “We’re trying,” she sighed, “but it’s not easy. I hear you went to see Ci.”

  “She told you?”

  “Yeah. She doesn’t want you investigating Lonnie’s death. The investigation is holding the spirit on the earth plane, keeping it from moving into the light, Ci says.”

  “She would.”

  Jamie brushed her hair back. “Why are you doing it, Neil? Isn’t that up to the police?”

  “It should be, but they’re not doing shit. The Darmers believe she was murdered, and they hired me to look into it.”

  “Who would murder Lonnie? Why would anybody murder Lonnie?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Tim appeared at the far side of the living room and walked across the floor in his stocking feet. His hair, charged with something—static electricity, maybe—buzzed around his head. “Neil, darlin,” He put his arm around me and gave me a charge.

  “Timito,” I replied.

  “Timber,” the unspoken third voice said, “Baloney, Maloney.” Tim heard it, so did I, but Jamie wasn’t listening. “I think we should get going,” he said, staring at the far side of the kitchen with vacant newborn’s eyes.

  “What’s the rush?” Jamie asked. “We’ve got time to finish our sodas.”

  “Take them with you. Let’s go. Did you bring your car, Neil?”

  “Not my car, the rental. Mine hasn’t been fixed yet.”

  “Was I right, was it the carburetor?”

  “You were right.”

  “Are you coming back here after the reading?” He was speaking to me but staring at the empty place near the microwave where he, Lonnie and I had stood.

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll be needin’ two cars. Listen, Jamie, why don’t I drive in with Neil, show her where Babe’s is?” I knew where Babe’s was, but that didn’t seem to be the point.

  Jamie may have known it too, but she said, “All right.”

  I was the first one onto the wooden floor, took a few running steps for momentum and slid over the gym finish in my stocking feet. I made it all the way across the living room in one long glide and got to the pile of shoes before anyone else did. “Your shoes, darlin’.” I picked up the muddy Adidases and handed them to Tim, turning them over in my hand and noticing as I did the Vs that were embedded in the soles. If I’d gone into the bathroom I probably would have found the toilet seat up, too. Tim wasn’t the tidiest guy in the world. “Your shoes look like they’re flying south,” I said.

  “Huh?” replied Tim.

  “The Vs,” I showed him. “Like flying birds.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Tim.

  “So?” Jamie asked, her eyes meeting mine over the shoes.

  “So,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She grabbed a pair of loafers out of the pile and stepped into them. Foxy Lady, picking up on these not so subtle clues from the human side, went to the door and wagged her long, red tail. “I think we should leave Foxy in tonight,” said Jamie.

  “Out,” replied Tim.

  “In,” said Jamie, pushing Foxy aside as we went out the door to our respective automobiles.

  Jamie got her clutch engaged and her Toyota in gear faster than I was able to move the knob on the legger from P to D. She sped out of the driveway, leaving us in the mud
. “Seems to be in a hurry,” I said.

  “A hurry to get away from me,” replied Tim. He didn’t say anything else so I watched the moon come up behind a mesa and spotlight the lonesome highway as I drove. It wasn’t quite full yet and a little lopsided, but big enough to make coyotes howl and bright enough to hide the stars. Tim didn’t speak until we reached the bridge and Jamie’s distant taillights had gotten red and tiny as coyote eyes. “Don’t ever get married again,” were his words.

  “I thought you two were happy if anybody was.”

  “Sometimes we are, sometimes we’re not. It’s been the pits lately.”

  “Is the move the problem?”

  “Who the fuck knows what’s the problem. Have you got a cigarette?”

  “In my purse. You did say you quit, didn’t you?”

  “This doesn’t count; it’s yours. If I don’t buy ’em and I don’t smoke in the house where Jamie can smell it, then I’m not really smoking. See?” He fumbled around in my purse until he found the Marlboros. “You want one?” he asked.

  “Why not?” I buy them, I smoke them. I’ll admit it. He lit two cigarettes and passed one to me. “Lonnie and I had a heart to heart when we made this drive after your party,” I told him since I didn’t have anybody else to tell. “She asked me if I had slept with Rick; I told her I had but it was fifteen years ago.”

  “You, too? What do women see in that guy anyway?”

  “Who knows? It was anybody and everybody back then. It only happened once.”

  “Did it bother Lonnie?”

  “A little, but the fact that Rick is marrying Marci Coyle bothered her a whole lot more.” I knocked the ash from my cigarette. “You know her parents don’t think she killed herself.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then what do you think happened?”

  “Rick killed her.” Tim sucked in smoke, savoring every carcinogenic puff.

  “How?” I asked, wondering what Tim knew about carotid sleepers and dangerous sexual practices. It didn’t seem like something a long-married couple would do.