Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  “Pretty good throw for someone who’s not much into sports.”

  Sasha considers the rocks in her hand, as if she might still throw them. “I think this is more warlike than sporty.”

  “Are we at war?”

  She drops the pebbles at the base of the ginkgo tree, then stuffs her hands into the pocket of her hoodie. “No,” she says.

  “I couldn’t solve your last cipher,” I say. “In the cereal ad.”

  “There wasn’t one,” she says. Any comfort my ego might take from this fact is overshadowed by renewed worry. As far as I know, Sasha has never missed an opportunity to secretly impugn whatever it is she’s supposed to be selling. I get the feeling that she’s stepping back, slowly eliminating traces of herself, if not from the world then at least from what I can see of it.

  “Good to know my record remains unblemished,” I say. I don’t ask her why she failed to devise a cipher, nor why she stopped going to group. “Where’ve you been?”

  She shrugs. “Around.” But she hasn’t been around. Or maybe I haven’t been around. “I was thinking you might play hooky for the day,” she says.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “Not from work,” she says. “From your life.”

  Behind me, the hum of the shower has been replaced by the whine of the hair dryer. Though wedding duty calls, my concern for Sasha is quickly trumping it. I don’t know what playing hooky from life looks like, but my imagination runs dark, and I don’t want to let Sasha do it by herself. I suppose I could tell Jennifer the truth, though I’d have to explain my concern, and that would mean disclosing the fact that I used to go to group. Jennifer knows that Sasha and I are friends, but not how we met, just as she knows that I broke my leg as a boy, but not how. I can already hear the alarm bells going off in her head. I don’t want her to get all worked up about it, nor do I feel like hearing the inevitable indictment of suicide and those who might consider it. Jennifer’s enthusiasm for life isn’t terribly patient with those who don’t always share it.

  So rather than get into all of this, I bury it, like any good Chance would. Instead, I play sick, which is so obvious that it works. When Jennifer emerges from the bathroom, I am facedown on the couch, holding my stomach and groaning into a pillow. The flu, I say. She feels my forehead and says she doesn’t think so. Food poisoning, I say. She asks what I ate. I tell her milk and cornflakes. Though I suspect she may be onto me, she doesn’t argue. She pours the rest of the milk down the sink and asks if I want her to stay home, too. I tell her that I’ll be fine, that she should go enjoy herself. She blows me a kiss on her way out.

  Fortunately, fake illnesses pass swiftly. I rise from the couch, lamenting the loss of good milk but not the chance to attend another wedding. Jennifer, I know, will do just fine without me. I shed my suit for jeans and a sweater. It feels good to lose the tie. Moments later Sasha and I are strolling through the narrow lanes of Greenwich Village. In green sneakers with frayed laces, Sasha sets an unhurried, somewhat listless pace, which nevertheless seems bent toward some final destination.

  “What should we do?” I ask.

  “I want to know what happens after you die.”

  My unspoken fears begin to breach the surface. “Sasha—”

  “So we’re going to ask the experts.”

  This is not the response I had anticipated. In my befuddlement, I ask the first question that pops into my head. “Are these experts still living?”

  “I hope so,” says Sasha. “I’ve made appointments.”

  Before I can determine whether or not she’s joking, we are climbing the steps of a small church. The building’s dark stone and Gothic archways collect what shadows they can from the morning light. “First stop,” says Sasha. Now I really think she’s joking. Not that I don’t think the church has answers. I just wouldn’t have predicted that Sasha would be interested in hearing them. Yet her face bears no hint of her trademark sardonic grin. I grip the curved handle and pull.

  To sundrenched eyes, the shadows within are even deeper, the vaulted ceiling lost in darkness. Sasha and I walk down the center aisle toward a raised marble altar, past rows of empty wooden pews on either side. The ponderous stone walls of the nave are punctuated with high windows of stained glass, where solemn faces enact scenes in fractured color.

  A door beside the altar leads to a decidedly more mundane office. From behind an old writing desk, a priest emerges and greets us warmly. Clean shaven and relatively young, he could easily be mistaken for one of my office mates, but for his black garb and the white patch of his clerical collar. He graciously pours us coffee while we take our seats. Sasha wastes little time before posing her question.

  “Heaven happens,” responds the priest. “Or hell, of course. Or purgatory, in those borderline cases.” He smiles. “Which likely includes most of us.”

  “Are there angels?” asks Sasha. I watch her face, looking for any sign of sarcasm, but there is none. This is confusing to me, if not exactly surprising. Sasha wouldn’t mock someone else’s faith, and certainly wouldn’t make an appointment on a Saturday just to do so. Yet if her curiosity is genuine, I fear her motives.

  “Yes,” says the priest. “I believe there are angels.”

  “And heaven is forever,” says Sasha.

  “Yes.”

  “But not purgatory.”

  “No,” says the priest. “Purgatory is temporary.”

  “So time exists in the afterlife?” asks Sasha. “How do they measure it? Do they use Earth days?”

  “In all honesty,” says the priest, “the details haven’t been made very clear to us.” He sets down his coffee and leans forward slightly. Though his smile fades, his kindness does not. “But make no mistake. You have—you are—an everlasting soul. When your journey here is done, you will go on. And you will not be alone.” He opens his arms to indicate the room around us. “This is not all there is.”

  An hour later, Sasha and I have traded the hush of the priestly enclosure for the glare of a neurologist’s office. The doctor—a portly man whose jowls have slumped with age—reclines in his chair, his head in line with several model skulls displayed on his desk. He is surprised to learn that we’re not here for medical advice.

  “Nothing happens,” he says. “This is all there is.”

  “Sounds boring,” says Sasha.

  The neurologist takes off his wire-rimmed glasses and drops them in the breast pocket of his lab coat. His plump fingers rub at the bridge of his nose. “It would be,” he says, “if you were there to experience it.”

  “How do you know I won’t be?” Sasha’s tone is even, and I can’t tell whether her question is a challenge or a plea.

  “Because physiological activity in the brain is not evidence of consciousness. It is consciousness. When your brain dies, when your EEG flattens, you’re gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Nowhere. Just gone.”

  Sasha falls silent, possibly trying to absorb this nihilistic decree. I try to come to her aid. “Things can’t just be gone,” I say. “Wouldn’t that violate some law of thermodynamics or something?”

  “It might,” say the neurologist, “if consciousness were distinct from the brain and chemicals and electricity. Those things aren’t gone. They just . . . stop. And then decay, like other matter. Gone really isn’t the right word to describe what happens to us. It would be more accurate to say that we cease.”

  “Cease what?” asks Sasha.

  “Existing.” He looks at us flatly, his dispassionate conviction inviting neither compromise nor debate. “This is your life,” he says. “This is your story. There’s nothing after but a blank page.”

  “How can you be sure?” asks Sasha.

  The neurologist lets out a small sigh. “For the same reason I’m sure there is no elephant under my chair,” he says. “Because there is no reason to think otherwise.”

  The ensuing silence expands until it seems to envelop us, muffling our goodbyes and our ret
reat from the hospital. Even the clatter of the subway and the clamorous streets of the Bronx feel muted, until we eventually find ourselves standing at the door of the Buddhist meditation center where Sasha has booked our next engagement. As we pass over the threshold into the dim spaciousness within, we appear to bring our quiet with us.

  The meditation hall is largely unadorned, with floors of blond hardwood and brick walls painted white. At the far end, a wooden sculpture of the Buddha sits on a low stand. Lining the floor between us and the sculpture are several neat rows of blue cushions, each with a round pillow at its center. All are empty but for the one nearest the sculpture, where a monk in an orange robe sits cross-legged. He would appear to be deep in meditation, but for the fact that his eyes are open and he’s looking at us. He raises a hand and beckons us forward.

  We leave our shoes by the door and pad softly over the smooth wood until we stand before the monk. Sasha drops unceremoniously to the floor. I sit down beside her and cross my legs. My nose crinkles at the faint scent of incense burning at the foot of the sculpture.

  “I want to know what happens after you die,” says Sasha.

  The monk raises his eyebrows, but says nothing. I wonder if he’s taken a vow of silence, or if that’s even something that Buddhist monks do. My fears are not allayed when he rises from the floor and disappears through a doorway at the back of the room. A moment later he returns with a box of matches and three small, colored candles—the kind you would put on a birthday cake. The monk resumes his seated position, handing one candle to me and another to Sasha. Then he lights the third candle and sets the box of matches on the floor behind him.

  The monk looks at us with shining eyes. His bald head and smooth skin don’t suggest any particular age. He is certainly not a child. And not elderly. Somewhere, then, along the ageless plateau of middle life. He nods toward the flame in his hand.

  “So,” he says finally. “The candle is me. The flame is me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” says Sasha.

  He leans forward, bringing his candle just close enough to Sasha’s so that the flame leaps from wick to wick. He then blows out his candle, leaving Sasha’s burning.

  “Now I have died,” he says, indicating first his own candle, then Sasha’s. “And you are born. The candle is you. The flame is you. The flame is me.”

  “And when I die?” Sasha asks.

  The monk nods toward the candle in my hand. Sasha reaches out and lights my candle, then blows out her own.

  “Just so!” says the monk. “Now?”

  “Elliot is born,” says Sasha. “The candle is Elliot. The flame is Elliot. But the flame is also me. And the flame is also you.”

  “Just so,” says the monk.

  “And this just keeps going forever?”

  He nods, tilting his head slightly. “Until nirvana.”

  “What happens then?”

  The monk leans forward, his eyes bright, his lips curled in the hint of a grin. With a sharp puff, he blows my candle out.

  The sky has slipped into afternoon by the time Sasha and I are back on the street. We glide through a world of asphalt and concrete and shop windows, of wheezing car brakes and the shouts of children rushing home from school. Sasha seems distracted, and her listless pace has become desultory.

  “Just so,” I say. “Who’s next?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Those were all the experts?”

  “The ones I could get appointments with.” Sasha’s mood is pensive, if not exactly dispirited. Nevertheless, I feel the need to try to cheer her up.

  “It’s like we’re inside a joke,” I say, affecting a comedic tone. “So a priest, a monk, and a neurologist walk into a bar—”

  “It’s for a project,” says Sasha.

  I stop my jest, not knowing where it was going anyway. My worry finally gets the best of me. As fond as Sasha may be of puzzles, I’m unable to let this particular one continue. “Does this project involve ending your life?”

  She casts me a quick glance. “No,” she says simply.

  Sasha has never lied to me, and I have no reason to start doubting her now. I take her at her word and let it go. “Good,” I say. “I don’t want you jumping from a tree and fracturing your tibia.”

  She smiles. “Pretty sure I’m coordinated enough to stick the landing without breaking my leg.”

  “Is that right?” I say. “I think it would depend on the tree. The branch might be so insanely high that no one could possibly stick the landing. Even if, hypothetically, they were an exceptionally gifted athlete.”

  Sasha laughs, and the tension I’ve been feeling all day—all week—vaporizes. “I’d like to see it,” she says.

  “The tree? Or me jumping from it?”

  “I’d settle for the tree.”

  It’s easy enough to get to my old neighborhood, though I haven’t been back since my parents moved out of the house a few years ago. Sasha and I take the subway to Grand Central, then jump on the first northbound train. The hum of the rails would typically inspire a nap, but today I just stare out the window. As the New York cityscape gradually transforms into Connecticut’s leafy suburbs, my mind loosens its grip. Cast aside are thoughts of priests and monks, candles and neurologists, even audits and savings rates. The jetsam fades to black and white as it goes, as if in deference to the kaleidoscopic autumn foliage outside the window. I’d forgotten how beautiful the colors could be.

  I become entranced by the blur of it all. When the train stops and my gaze comes to rest on the peak of a distant house poking through the treetops, I see not a McMansion with a mortgage but a hidden castle engulfed in a sea of fire. The two towers rising from its roof are not chimneys but turrets. And the small, winged shadow circling them is nothing if not a dragon soaring over the flames.

  “Everything okay?” asks Sasha, retrieving me from my abstraction.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I just thought I saw a monster.”

  She looks at me sharply, and I scramble for some way to explain myself. I responded without thinking. It hadn’t occurred to me that my answer might disturb her. As it turns out, it didn’t.

  “Good,” she says, smiling. “I was wondering if that guy was going to show up again.” She rises from her seat. “This is us.”

  The streets of my childhood are much the same, though fences now surround the yards. We scale one barrier to get into my old backyard, and another to access the woods behind Esther’s house—or what used to be Esther’s house. I await the shout that will expose us as trespassers, but it never comes. We pass deeper into the forest, the first brown leaves of fall crunching under our feet. The rusted farm equipment is gone, but the old stump is still there, and the tree beside it. I point out the fateful branch to Sasha.

  “That’s pretty high,” she admits.

  “Damn straight.”

  Sasha crouches down and runs her fingertips over the face of the stump. It is no longer hard and smooth, but softened and scarred by the years. “And this is your doorway,” she says with quiet sincerity. “Your passage to another world.”

  “I don’t know about that. My tibia would argue that it’s a tree stump.”

  “Maybe it was a door,” says Sasha. “And it opened, and you don’t even realize it. Maybe we’re already in the other world.”

  “If so, it looks an awful lot like the first one.”

  “Does it?” she asks, but she isn’t looking at me, and doesn’t seem to expect an answer. Above us, light from the falling sun catches in the canopy of leaves, setting it afire and dropping the undergrowth into early dusk. My eyes fall to a dark hollow in the bushes behind Sasha. Something shifts in the shadows there—not a squirrel or a breath of wind among the branches but a flicker of deeper black against the gray. My chest flutters when I see that it’s the dancing shade of my youth. It seems to be jumping in place and falling, with the same jest and melodrama it brought to its original burlesque, years ago, when it mimicked my brother and me catching leaves.
>
  “What is it?” asks Sasha.

  I decide not to further test Sasha’s ability to suspend disbelief in me. At least not today. “That’s where Esther jumped out from, when she scared me and the twins.”

  Sasha laughs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it.”

  “I’m not. I may have peed my pants a little.” My mind drifts back to summer and crickets, and Esther on her back patio, sitting with a lantern in the night.

  “You had a crush on her,” says Sasha.

  “Please,” I say. “I was ten. And she was fortysomething, I think.”

  “So what? I didn’t say it was sexual. Crushes don’t do age.”

  Fair enough, I think. Maybe I did carry a bit of a platonic torch for Esther. “She was awesome,” I say. “You would’ve had a crush on her, too.”

  “Maybe we should find out,” says Sasha.

  Even in this age of the internet, it’s not always easy to find someone you’ve lost. The computers may all be connected, but the people aren’t. My mother professes not to know where Esther went, and the family that lives in Esther’s old house is no help either. Maybe someday we’ll all have chips in our heads that will tell everyone exactly where we are at all times, but for now I’m left scouring the web for a sign. Weeks of searching leave me with a single lead—a list of donors to a small public library in upstate New York. Esther’s name is on it.

  The white pages for the town aren’t online, so I dial Information. For some reason I’m surprised to learn that Esther’s number is listed. Perhaps a part of me thought that, like the monsters, she never really existed. Yet if the shade is back . . . Anyway, this may not even be the same Esther—a possibility that seems more likely when I reach an answering machine and don’t recognize the voice. But maybe Esther’s voice has changed with age. Or maybe it’s just been too long.

  I leave a message and wait. The next day, when my office phone shows an incoming call from an unknown number, I hold my breath and answer it. It’s the woman from the answering machine, and with each word, she becomes more familiar.