"What else can you tell me about how the investigation is going?" he asks, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. He is thinking that maybe his DNA would not mean that much if found on Renee. After all he is her boyfriend. Was, he corrects silently, looking out the window in the corner of the small office. It is only about a foot wide, runs from the floor to ceiling. He can't seem to wrap his mind around was.
"That is about it at this time," Nielson says and looks at the gold watch on his wrist. Suddenly he rises and comes around the desk, arm extended to Blaine. "I'm sorry," he says. "I have another appointment in just a couple minutes. Please drop by again if you'd like, and we will let you know any major developments."
They shake hands, and he ushers Blaine out and shuts the office door behind them, gives him a half-wave, and is gone down the corridor.
Blaine is not sure what to think of all this. They apparently do not think he is a real suspect or would have tested him sooner. It is odd to him that they don't want a sketch as soon as possible. It confirms to him that they have another direction in which they have taken things. A suspect. Someone they are looking at. And if that is true, then they definitely know something he does not. Is it a guy that Renee had been seeing while they were split up? She had admitted to several. Said they had all been over with for a while. Maybe she had just said that because she didn't want him to know. He had asked the people at the bar about that night, but he hadn't even considered asking if she had someone else who had visited her out there. Maybe the casual flings she had admitted to had been more than casual. Maybe the big guy in the bar had nothing to do with this. Or maybe he had more to do with Renee than she had let on. His head is full of jumbled thoughts as he walks down to the old Dodge and cranks her up, heads for the beach.
Chapter 22
The next morning he is coming out of his half-sleep daze when he feels the warmth and the bright light, that same sense of not needing to struggle and a near feeling of oneness with all around him and realizes this is the feeling he had felt when he had been dead. Or almost dead. Whatever. He blinks his eyes and looks up at the ceiling then closes them again, trying to recover that sensation but it is gone.
Gone, but not forgotten. This is how it felt that day. This is where he had gone. He has no doubt.
And the feeling of it: calm, peaceful, a relaxation he had never felt before. He remembers! And knows that the vision or dream or whatever he had just felt, was just a pale reflection of what he had felt in death. He blinks his eyes and shuts them again, willing that feeling to return. It had been like nothing he had ever experienced. But it will not come. After a few minutes he opens them back up and looks around.
All the jokes and the talk about the tunnel and the bright light don't seem quite so funny.
He lies there for minutes more, feeling the traces and remnants of that, then finally gets up reluctantly and pads into the living room to the bookcases, searches through his collection of books on brain function, leafing through several, trying to find information on near-death experiences. He knows that several of the neuroscientists have attempted, and maybe succeeded in, pinpointing the brain regions involved in these. All a matter of brain chemistry, according to them. Oxygen deprivation and lack of sensory input combining to create a fugue or dream state. He thinks about that for a bit. Did that explanation make the experience any less real? It was the same when they told you that love was a result of the bonding produced by the chemical oxytocin. Did that make the experience of love any less real? It was just an explanation on a different level: that was all.
It was like someone asking you why you were going to the store, and you began telling them about this and that neuron firing and the apparatus to get your legs moving starting up and so on. Factual and true, but what that person was probably looking for was the fact that you were out of milk and were going to get some.
He is glad that Todd is still asleep, and he has some time for all this to sink in. He likes to think he is a scientist in his own way but one of the things he has learned is to respect the phenomenon. Non-scientific types were always talking about scientific explanation ruining the enjoyment of experience, but he doesn't believe that to be true in most cases. Climbing and surfing are exceptions. Maybe this?
It had not felt at all like something was ending, he thinks. More like something was beginning, like some limitation he hadn't known existed was being removed. He remembers how he had thought of Renee yesterday on the beach. That feeling that it didn't matter if she continued on in some other form or fashion because she was lost to him. But now that he has remembered his death, it seems to him that perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps she was out there somewhere, still reachable.
He has drifted back into the bedroom, without consciously planning that, and now sits on the bed. Oh my God, he thinks, and drops his face into his hands, rubs his eyes, shuts them and listens to the small sounds around him: tree branches rustling outside the window, a car somewhere down the street, raspy click-clack of some bird, the clatter of the AC kicking on. In his mind he shouts out "Renee." It is as loud as it can be. He focuses his energy inward, searches for her in the darkness. Wills her to answer. The outer sounds vanish into the background as he tries to bring her back to him. Searching. Searching.
"Blaine?" His bedroom door has swung open, and his brother is standing there in boxers and T-shirt, hair standing up on his head like electricity is running through it. "You all right, man?"
"Yeah, fine," he says, squinting up at him. "Just resting my eyes for a minute."
"Oh," says Todd, like this is a common practice, perfectly understandable. "How about some breakfast? I'll make."
"Sounds great," he says, more to get Todd out of there than because he is hungry. "Got a touch of a headache," he lies, making it up on the spot. Sounds more convincing.
"Awright, my man. Breakfast coming up." The door swings shut, and he is by himself again.
He blinks into the sudden return to aloneness, and his thoughts return to death. What it is. What it isn't.
So the universe is what, some nearly 14 billion years old, he thinks, and we come into it after all that time, stay less than a blink of an eye, and we're gone. Or maybe not. What if this was just a transition. What if we went someplace else? Maybe there was a reason that so many people believed in heaven.
Better watch myself, I'll be going to séances and holding hands with strangers at tables, he thinks. But even though he is mocking himself, he cannot deny the power of the memory that has come back to him. If more people had an experience like that they wouldn't be so scared of death, he thinks. Might not fight so hard to live, either. Maybe that's why more people don't have one. It wouldn't do not to fight hard to live, would it?
"Come and get it," Todd hollers from the other room, and at the dining table are plates heaped high with poached eggs, toast, and bacon. All microwaved but the toast. Still, for them, a gourmet feast. The brothers sit to eat and Todd pours him some orange juice. He is eyeballing Blaine surreptitiously as he shovels forkfuls of breakfast into his mouth, and Blaine realizes he is concerned. He briefly considers telling him about recovering his memory of death and decides against it. If he told him that, he'd really be concerned. Maybe later, after he thinks about it a while, figures out what it really means.
"So what did you find out from the cops?" Todd asks. "Anything?" He had gone out to visit some old friends the night before, and Blaine had called it a day early, before he got home.
"I think they have somebody else they're looking at," Blaine says, and tells him about the talk with Nielson and giving his DNA, the way the guy didn't seem that interested in him. He tells him about the defensive wounds under her nails and the lack of information at the bar. Todd is nodding, taking it all in. He doesn't tell him about his suspicion that she might have had a lover or two more than she admitted, or that they could have been more serious than she let on. Really he has no idea if those things are true, and it seems small to tarnish her memor
y without any real basis. Though even if she did have a lover or two more than she admitted: so what? They had been broken up. No law against easing the loneliness, was there? Hell, he'd been drooling on Kimmy at the hospital and Mandy after that just a few days ago.
Todd says, "Well, that all sounds good, like they might be making some progress. These guys do this stuff for a living, bro. I wouldn't worry so much about it. They'll find this guy."
Blaine nods. Todd says he has a few things he needs to take care of this morning, couple of people to go see, so they make plans to hook up towards evening.
"You be all right?" he asks. "I can cancel out if you need me to. Nothing 'graved in stone."
"No, go ahead," says Blaine, getting up and taking his dish to the sink. "I don't need to be babysat. I'm fine, man." He knows Todd likes to make the rounds whenever he comes down to visit, catch up with some of his old partners. He'd like a bit of time to himself anyway. He is still unsettled about this morning, wondering what his memory meant. He'd like to poke around in the books some more, though he doesn't think he'll find much there. Maybe search the internet. No telling what crackpot stuff he can find on near-death. Probably a boatload.
Chapter 23
There is a boatload and most of it is crackpot stuff. That is his first impression after climbing on board the Net train and leaving the station. There are bright lights up the kazoo. Wise explanations of the suffering of the everyday. Telepathy. Reincarnation. He feels like he has stepped into a time machine and travelled backwards a thousand years. He doesn't even want to think what he would find under the time travel link.
There are international organizations, a pecking order of gurus to choose from. He should have known. People love pecking orders, abhor vacuums. Explanations seem to focus on the physical life as a training ground, where we work through mistakes and learn. That is the most common explanation for reincarnation. Basically, you keep coming back until you have gotten it right. That allows for a hierarchy of souls to be around. Some are old and almost have completed their learning process. Some are young with a long way to go. He wonders where a stone killer fits in. Where evil fits in. The favorite analogy seems to be that of a river where we are the individual drops, joining and leaving the river as it flows to the great sea. The essence of the drops is the same as that of the whole.
It all makes him want to puke. Humans have a talent, he thinks, that ability to stand aside from experience and talk about it. The thing is that some experiences, like those he had been thinking about the other day, the flow of experience while surfing or climbing mountain walls, didn't lend themselves that well to the talk. The very act of talking about these experiences was a contradiction. The memorable and wonderful thing about them was how the distance between you and everything else dissolved as you became immersed in the acts. When you talked about them, you necessarily brought the distance back and highlighted it.
It was the same with the light and the tunnel. Here he'd had this absolutely unique thing happen to him, something unlike anything he'd ever experienced, and these people out on the web, thousands of them, apparently, were on it from all sides like jackals, ripping it or something like it into a thousand small pieces that they could dissect and digest, and in the process making the entire deal unrecognizable. He sighs. He is a believer in science, but sometimes you can analyze things too much.
Though you couldn't call this science. The few scientists involved relegated this stuff to the dust bin of brain hallucinations brought on by lack of oxygen to certain brain regions when the brain was shutting down.
Blaine gets up from the machine, stretches, shuts it off. He doesn't know, really, what he had hoped to find, but whatever it was, this isn't it.
What he should be finding is Renee's killer.
He thinks about what he knows so far, and where he can go from here. Maybe somebody around her apartment area would know something. The police had her purse and the stuff in it, so they had her phone and addresses and numbers. If he had hold of that, he might be able to find whatever guys she had been dating, but they had it. Her car had been down on the beach, too, so either she had gone out there for some reason and been surprised by someone or they had gone together. In any case, the police had the car so he couldn't find out anything from that. He wonders if anything in her apartment would tell him anything. It is just a small studio on the east end of town, near the road that leads to the ferry and the Bolivar peninsula. The police probably have it sealed also, he thinks, but it is worth a look-see.
He knows where she keeps her spare key.
So he fires the beast up and goes rumbling up to the seawall. For a moment he can't remember what day it is, though the traffic is heavy on the wall: surfboards everywhere, people strolling, jogging, sleek tanned women glistening in tiny strips of cloth. Friday, right? Sunlight is everywhere, the brightness amazing. Life is everywhere. People out doing things they like to do. That's what Galveston Island is all about, really. It is a playground: a place people go to get away from the everyday humdrum. Fun in the sun. An entire community built on that. Sure, they have one or two big employers like the hospital and American National who aren't tourist oriented, but that's about it. The rest is a getaway fantasy they've been selling for over a hundred years. Big, fancy hotels that overlook the water: amusement parks and giant waterslides. One place even has an artificial beach that is much nicer than the real ones. The sand had been imported.
He passes the San Luis, probably the fanciest of the fancy hotels. Built on the only hill around: an artificial hill constructed to house bunkers during World War 2. The gun emplacements can still be seen. The hill had been wild and vacant for a long time, but now has bright green grass growing, and waterfalls cascading down the side.
The rock groins are full of people, the beach too. Umbrellas fluttering in the south wind, Frisbees flying, dogs running on the sand. Lifeguards in the towers, hunched over, watching. A few people die every year despite their vigilance. The eddies are tricky near the rocks, with many holes where it is easy to lose your footing. Rip currents that can take you straight out to sea.
Surfers surfing, too, playing their riffs like jazz men, though the waves are on the small side today. Motion and life everywhere, but not for Renee.
He finally gets through the traffic to the road near the ferry, and the cars are backed up on that too, so he cuts off onto some of the small back residential streets that are all named after fish. Marlin. Redfish. Bonita. Mako.
He snakes back and forth on those until he comes back to the ferry road, but much farther north, and the cars lined up finally give him a shot to get across into her apartment buildings.
Nothing fancy, just your everyday apartment complex. Brown brick and darker brown wood paneling. Tiny balconies with barbecue gear, plants hanging from hooks. Parking spaces not much wider than your vehicle. Speed bumps.
Her place is on the second floor, in back, facing a ball field where people from UTMB practice. She is far away from the office, and Blaine pulls in to a spot a distance down from the apartment. Her door, #270, has no yellow tape. It looks just like it always did. This wasn't even the scene of the crime, he thinks. The cops probably went through it, took anything they thought was relevant, and are long gone. Which means his odds of finding anything are slim. But, what the hell, it's not like he's doing anything more important, is it? Slim is better than none. That's why he buys lottery tickets. At least it's a chance.
He doesn't want to break in, though. Wonders what the chances are the spare key is still there. She has potted plants scattered around her door, set in those dishes that kept the water and soil from running everywhere. Used to put the key in the bottom of the pot farthest from the door.
The doors are inset, pushed back into small alcoves that give shelter and also a measure of privacy, for which he is glad.
He gets out of the truck and climbs the stairs, looking around. He is in luck. The only person in sight is a short black woman walking away with a clot
hes basket, toward the community washroom that is near the center of the complex. He stoops down and lifts the pot, and partially obscured by dirt, sees the bright gleam of metal. His pulse quickens, and he looks around one more time. Hell, he's not really breaking in; he has a key. He's not sure what the status of the apartment is now that Renee is gone. If her mother or somebody from the complex happens by, he can always tell them that he had forgotten a shirt or a book or something, and came over to get it. He hopes her mother doesn't show. He could have asked her, but when he remembered the key this just seemed simpler, without chance of refusal. He shakes the dirt off the key, rubs it on his jeans to clean it, puts it in the lock and opens the door.
Chapter 24
It smells musty inside, though she hasn't been gone that long. He steps into the room and swings the door shut behind him, twists the lock.
It is just a small combination living area. Just a room. There are a couple of pictures of Renee, one on the bar that separates the dining room from the kitchen, another on a small table next to the brightly colored fabric couch. He had laughed when he had first seen that couch, it was so colorful. That is what I like about it, she had said. Men always want to dampen everything down, scared to let go, she had said. Come here and play in the colors, she had said.
Even when she had lived with him, she had kept the apartment. He had thought it quirky and an unnecessary expense, but she had wanted to always have a place of her own. He had told her that his place was her place. But she had tossed that chestnut mane of hair at him and replied that legally that wasn't true. Legally she had no right to anything. Let's make it legal, then, he had said. No problem for him. He had been around a fair amount of women in his time, and nobody had ever affected him like Renee did. If she wasn't the right woman for him, nobody was. That had been the start of the discussion that had culminated in the big fight months later.
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