by Tommy Butler
He misses. He swings himself nearly out of his shoes, and ends up on his knees. From there he stares back at the catcher’s mitt, where the third strike rests snugly, safe from the now empty menace of Dean’s bat. The game is over. My brother’s shoulders give one small heave as he fights back tears. Then he stands up and hurls the bat against the fence. His outburst silences the crowd, so that when he turns and jeers at me, everyone can hear.
“Lucky pitch, weirdo. Who taught you that—your dancing monster?”
This is the beginning of the end of my undistinguished baseball career. By the following week, Dean has told half the league that I believe monsters visit me in my room each night to dance and sing and perform plays in flowered dresses. My relationships with the other players—most of whom are also classmates of mine at school—had previously ranged from friendship to, at worst, indifference, but are now transformed into ridicule or, at best, avoidance. Even my own teammates snicker behind my back. After a month of this, the flush in my face and ache in my chest start to feel permanent, and I decide I don’t need it anymore. I tell my mom that my shoulder hurts from too much throwing. In fact, it does hurt a bit, though whether the pain is from throwing is an open question. She lets me skip a practice, then a game, then another game, and without anyone declaring it, we come to the understanding that I’m not going back.
By the time summer arrives, I am spending more and more time alone. When I tire of the thin strip of trees behind our house, I venture into our neighbor’s more expansive woods. This is not the best idea. Mr. Harding is a notoriously mean human being. He is so thoroughly cantankerous that you get the feeling it was not the events of his life that made him so but rather that he was born hostile, and remained true to form throughout every one of his eighty-plus years. The woods behind his house are thick with leaves and mysteries, including the presence of old, rusted farm equipment—a hand plow, the shell of a tractor—which in my mother’s opinion makes the woods dangerous and is another reason why I shouldn’t be there.
It is late afternoon, and I am deep within these forbidden woods, when I find a group of low stones arranged into an unnaturally perfect ring. Resting on an old tree stump near the center of the ring is a book. Or most of a book—its cover and first few pages have been torn away. Without stopping to ponder its origin, or the incongruity of its presence here in the undergrowth, or even why I haven’t stumbled upon it sooner, I pick it up, sit down with my back to the tree stump, and begin reading.
At that time in Neverene, there was a giant, with a giant heart.
A shiver runs through me. I am suddenly disoriented, though I don’t know why. At the moment I finished reading these words, it seemed to me that there was a click and, for a fraction of a second, a darkening of the world around me, like the fall of a camera shutter. The sensation is so strong that I look around to see if someone is there, or if anything has changed. Yet everything appears in its place. The afternoon sun dapples the lap of my dirty jeans. The leaves sway in an imperceptible breath of wind. I shrug off my jitters and open the book again.
This time, when my surroundings disappear, I let them. For a moment there are only the letters on the page, and then they too are gone, and all that exists is the world they conjure. Neverene. From the beginning, a medley of tales seems already under way, featuring a motley collection of players. But it is Neverene itself that captivates me. It is fantastical, mystical—and somehow conscious. Everything in Neverene—animate or inanimate—is awake. Trees speak, rocks feel, even the weather has intentions. And then there is the giant, with a heart so big he can commune with all of it, whether flesh or wood, stone or sky.
I stop reading only when the failing light demands it, when the white pages seem to glow and the black letters shuffle and blend into one another. I look up. Hours have passed. The sun is gone, and the woods have fallen into half-light. The crickets start their chorus. Tiny sparks pulse in the air around me as the fireflies come to life. I rise on stiff legs and look for the path home, but the way is dark and my head is light. I’m chilled and, admittedly, a little scared. I don’t want to try to find my way back through the woods, so I opt for the shorter route that cuts across Mr. Harding’s back lawn. A risky move, but I hope the darkness will cover me.
I leave the woods and race across the open grass, hunching over as if this might somehow make me less visible. I am close to Mr. Harding’s house, and have almost reached the edge of his property, when a voice calls out.
“Hello, traveler.”
I freeze. A small glow ignites in the dark. Unlike the fireflies, it is steady and motionless, and for an instant I believe that the light itself is calling me. Then the glow brightens until I can see that it is a flame in a glass lantern, resting on a table on Mr. Harding’s back patio. To my relief, it is not Mr. Harding sitting there, but a woman I don’t recognize.
“Hello,” I respond.
“What are you up to?” she asks. Her voice is clear and light.
“I was . . . nothing.”
“Oh, I doubt you were nothing,” she says. “And I doubt you were up to nothing, too. But you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Something about her relaxes me—whether her voice itself or her gentle teasing. I stand up straight, no longer looking to run. “Why did you call me traveler?”
“I figured that’s what you are,” she says. “Either that or a leprechaun.”
“A leprechaun?” I bite back a snicker. “I’m not a leprechaun. I’m a boy.”
“Well, isn’t that just what a leprechaun would say! Now I’m really suspicious. Step into the light so I can get a look at you.”
I draw closer, and can see her better now. She has calm eyes and a pale, smooth face. Her hair—brown with fine streaks of gray that glitter in the lamplight—falls messily down to her shoulders. She seems neither old nor young.
“It’s hard to tell by the lamp,” she says. “Is your skin green?” Now I can’t help but giggle. “Did I say something funny?” she asks.
I immediately stop. “No, sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “You can laugh. I don’t mind.” She smiles, the skin around her eyes crinkling into elfin wings. “I’m Esther.”
“I’m Elliot. I live next door.”
“Very nice to meet you, Elliot. I think I’ve met your parents—the entrepreneurs?”
“No, the Chances.”
She laughs. I’m confused by this, and would probably be offended except that it’s a beautiful, almost contagious sound—bright and shiny, ringing from her throat like a little bell. It occurs to me that you’re not required to be offended when someone laughs at you. You can just let them laugh. Still, I’d like to know why.
“Did I say something funny?”
She stops. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind either.”
Esther nods, then leans forward in her chair. “An entrepreneur is someone who starts a new venture,” she explains. “Someone who takes a chance. So you see, we were kind of saying the same thing. Your parents own the shoe store, right?”
“Yes.” Talking about my parents reminds me that I should probably get home. It’s officially dark now. My mother will start to worry soon, at which point she’ll open the back door and loudly call my name until she can see me coming. For some reason I’d rather Esther didn’t witness this summons, but I’m also not eager to leave. My family and I aren’t saying a whole lot to each other these days, and the more I think about it, the more I realize we never really have, as if there were only so much oxygen in the rooms of our house, and too much talking would threaten our ability to breathe.
“Do you want to be an entrepreneur someday?” Esther asks.
“No.” The quickness of my reply surprises me, but all I can think of is the shoe store and my mother’s perpetual state of anxiety and the blood rushing to my father’s face after his morning work calls. “I want to help them.”
“How so
?”
I want to explain to Esther about how I listen to my parents’ conversations and try to catalog their problems so that I can find solutions for them, but my head swims in a fragmented sea of worries I don’t understand—mortgages and personal guarantees, interest rates, employee turnover, supply chains. My shoulders hunch up toward my ears as helplessness sets in, and I can’t gather my thoughts into any kind of coherent response. “I’m not sure,” I finally say. “Maybe I could be an advisor?”
“That sounds like a great idea,” says Esther. “I bet you’re gaining all kinds of valuable experience just by watching your parents, and someday you’ll be able to put it all together and give other entrepreneurs wonderful advice.”
Instantly, my shoulders release and the helplessness subsides. At the same time, my throat tightens so that I can’t reply. Yes, I want to say. Yes, that’s just what I meant.
“And what do you have there?” Esther asks, nodding toward the book in my hand.
For a moment I had actually forgotten about the book. Now my mind lights up with memories of Neverene, and my heart with a desire to return. “It’s about a place,” I say. “A really cool place.”
“Ah,” says Esther. “That sounds wonderful.”
I grip the book a bit more tightly, as if someone might take it from me. Esther doesn’t seem to notice. She just looks at me patiently. Reluctantly, I remind myself that the book isn’t mine, and I hold it out to her. “I found it in the woods. I was just going to borrow it.”
“From whom?”
“From Mr. Harding, I guess.”
For the first time since I’ve met her, Esther’s face falls and the light in her eyes dims. “Mr. Harding passed away,” she says.
I stiffen. Outside our circle of lamplight, the darkness suddenly feels dangerous and empty. I’ve never known anyone who has died. I may not have liked Mr. Harding, but his death unnerves me, and I feel guilty for having been relieved that he wasn’t on his patio tonight.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” says Esther. “But he had a long life, and one that he could call his own. And that means a lot.”
“He didn’t like us playing in his woods.”
Esther nods. “He cherished his solitude. Also, he was a jerk.” At the look of shock on my face, she laughs. “It’s true,” she says, “but he was my uncle and I loved him all the same.” I am even more surprised to hear that Esther was Mr. Harding’s niece. It’s hard for me to believe that two such different people could share the same genes.
“Anyway,” she continues with a sigh, “I suppose the woods aren’t his anymore. There’s nobody here but me. As far as I’m concerned, you may play in them as you wish, and the book you found is yours.”
My chest warms. Though the tightness returns to my throat, this time I’m able to speak through it. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome,” says Esther. “Now I wonder if maybe you should get home so your parents don’t worry about you?”
I nod, give a little wave, and go. When I reach the crumbling stone wall that separates our yards, I pause and turn. “I was glad to talk with you,” I call back.
From within the circle of lamplight, Esther raises her hand. “Farewell, traveler who is not a leprechaun.”
In the Future
Bannor says that in the future you can talk to the dead.
Which was inevitable, he says, once they figured out how to seamlessly connect a computer to the human brain. He says biochip implants are commonplace in the future, and their usage has graduated from the vulgar, like the chip in your wrist that allows you to pay for groceries, to the profound, like the one in your skull that combats the onslaught of dementia.
It was a dementia patient who was the first to communicate from the grave. Her name was Rose. She had a garden-variety biochip in her head, connected wirelessly to her computer, which monitored and maintained proper brain function. At the age of ninety-four, Rose died peacefully in her sleep. Her daughter found her body the next morning, and nearly jumped out the window when the computer broke the silence by asking what was for breakfast. There was a long, anxious moment before Rose and her daughter realized that Rose had died and was somehow speaking through the computer. Their conversation lasted exactly three minutes before the process fried what was left of Rose’s neural pathways, but it was a breathtaking, if unintended, achievement—one that the public quickly and rather boorishly labeled “Rosurrection.”
It also unleashed a series of absolute shitstorms. The first, following immediately on the heels of the discovery, was the widespread and unauthorized exhumation of corpses. In addition to fistfights, riots, and a villainous stench, this craze led to significant public health hazards, if not moral ones. Fortunately, the gravediggers mostly hung up their shovels once scientists discovered that Rosurrection wouldn’t work if the brain had been dead for more than a few days.
The second major flap was over whether the technology—or the practice, or whatever you wanted to call it—should be permitted. A vocal minority demanded that it be outlawed altogether, based on an uneasy (and often self-contradictory) combination of religious, ethical, legal, patriotic, economic, and other grounds. But the future is a permissive place. Given that Rosurrection didn’t seem to be harming anyone, this quarrel soon withered on the vine.
In its stead arose the debate over whether we are really speaking with the dead at all. By all accounts, that initial conversation between Rose and her daughter had been coherent and personal, but the process doesn’t always run so smoothly. Sometimes the deceased don’t recognize their loved ones, or they speak nonsense, or sing the same song over and over, or say nothing at all. These apparent failures represent a small minority of cases, yet detractors take them as evidence that Rosurrection is not actually a conversation with the living consciousness of the deceased but rather just a random firing of synapses prodded by electrical stimulation. As to why many Rosurrected minds seem so lucid, these detractors hem and haw. Put a thousand Rosurrected brains in a room for long enough, they huff, and you’ll eventually get Shakespeare. In truth, it’s hard to prove whether we’re speaking with the deceased or just marvelous simulations, but most people don’t seem to care. There is a near universal ache to talk to the dead.
Which has led to blistering feuds over who has the right to do so. Though Rosurrection methodology has improved, scientists still haven’t figured out how to extend the process beyond just the same three minutes that Rose and her daughter were originally granted. Three minutes—no more, no less—which means there’s only so much time with the dead to go around, and everybody wants some. Laws are passed, repealed, and passed again. Courthouse hallways are clogged with litigants. In order to spare their descendants from years of fighting and legal fees, many people include provisions in their wills dictating whether they can be Rosurrected, and when, and by whom.
Despite its attendant chaos, Rosurrection has proliferated in the future. Bannor says that it has come to be viewed as one of those prosaic wonders, like childbirth or indoor plumbing. People speak with the dead every day, all around the world. But it’s always a little awkward. The dead themselves aren’t typically very chatty. So, after the obligatory last goodbye, the living usually end up asking a bunch of questions, from the practical to the provocative to the inane—What’s your email password? Where’d you put the kitty litter? Do you still love me? How come Jonathan got the house and the car and the money, and all I got were the rosebushes? For the suicides, an additional line of questioning inevitably awaits, always along the same lines—Why did you do it? How come you didn’t say anything? Was it something I did? This inquisition has become so frustratingly rote that the majority of suicides spend their three minutes mostly silent, quietly saying “I’m sorry” and leaving it at that.
Of course, there is another question—often the final one—that everyone asks the dead, and it has fomented the most intractable controversy of all, one so monumental that its two antagonistic
factions have received (or appropriated) proper epithets. On one side are the Foreverists, who claim that Rosurrection proves once and for all the existence of an afterlife and an everlasting soul. Death, say the Foreverists, is dead. On the other side are the Corporealists, who maintain that, while Rosurrection does indeed allow us to communicate with the dead, consciousness resides only in the physical body. They point out that Rosurrection requires an intact, undamaged brain in order to work, and insist that when the brain is no longer functional, the person is gone. Once your three minutes are up, say the Corporealists, death is alive and well.
The Foreverists counter that the dead sometimes tell strange tales, ones that they could not have experienced in their lifetimes. Some deceased describe looking over their former body, or waiting in a long line with other deceased. The Corporealists dismiss these rumors, likening them to the near-death experiences that have been claimed for centuries and never substantiated. Dying is stressful, say the Corporealists, and coming back—even for just three minutes—can’t be any easier. Of course the imagination goes berserk.
That final question—the one that incites this endless debate between the Foreverists and the Corporealists—is predictable enough. “Where have you gone?” we ask the dead. “And what’s it like there, where you are?”