BOUNDARIES
By T. M. Wright
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Reconstructed from scans and copy-edited by David Dodd
Cover art by: Jeremiah David Morelli : www.morjers-art.de
Copyright 2010 by T. M. Wright
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STRANGE SEEDS
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THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s
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POSSIBILITIES
When I think of The Other Side, I think of being reunited with loved ones who have passed over. And of being with them for eternity.
I think of eternity. No beginning. No end. It’s a concept that’s impossible to grasp but fun to think about.
I think that happiness will be continuous because The Other Side is the ultimate reward, after all.
And I think about love. I think that, in heaven, on The Other Side, love will be sweet and everlasting. And I think that I will have to get used to love without sex, because sex is earthbound and temporal. Because the spirit, I think—desperately rationalizing—cannot have any physical needs. It cannot need to eat, or defecate, or drink, or have sex because it no longer possesses a stomach, a colon, a tongue, genitalia. Its needs are . . . spiritual. Intellectual. Divine.
It spends eternity contemplating eternity (a pastime which may not seem very worthwhile to the earthbound, but which is probably the truest and happiest expression of the spirit).
And when I think of The Other Side, I think, too, that all these ideas may be no more valid than the babblings of Neanderthals who look at the moon and believe that it is a hole in the sky.
I think that The Other Side may be something completely unguessable.
—T.M. Wright
June 4, 1990
Ithaca, New York
BOOK ONE
A TOE IN THE WATER
ONE
These snapshots were nothing more than animal protein and a couple layers of colored dye and silver nitrate that the light got at for a microsecond. They were no more substantial than that—they weren’t Anne or even representations of Anne because the animal proteins, the dyes and silver nitrate had no intention of creating representations of her.
These snapshots were a fraud because they coaxed from him only microseconds of Anne’s life as he had witnessed it and remembered it. And her life could not be measured in microseconds.
So, if the police photographs, the photographs taken at her autopsy (and it was not her autopsy at all, was it?) showed a face as placid and blank as air, they showed only a couple hours of the existence of flesh over bone. Then the decay started in earnest and those images, as well, became a lie.
Still, he had to take these snapshots out and look at them. There were memories of Anne that existed around them. They were not his only memories of her, but they were among his best memories because snapshots are often taken during the best of times.
He turned some of the snapshots over—the ones that were most appealing or called up especially memorable moments—and checked for a date or a notation, or both. Then he turned the snapshot around, looked at it again for a second, set it aside and got another from the pile. He wept as he looked at them. He didn’t want to weep. He thought that if someone came to the door that he would answer it red-faced and then would have to bear up under his visitor’s embarrassment. It was a kind of agony he wanted to spare himself, an agony he wanted to spare the people who came to visit him.
He got his pipe out of his sports coat pocket and lit it from a pack of book matches on his desk. The blue tobacco smoke—it smelled of cherries—did a slow dance around his head and made his eyes sting. He put the pipe out, set it in a glass ashtray on his desk, and put the snapshots in a bottom drawer of the desk. Then he stood and went to a window at the back of the room. The window overlooked fields and hedgerows that were dark green and moist this day after a rain—Idyllic, he thought—and, as if the fields and hedgerows could answer, he asked aloud, "Where is Anne? Where is my sister, Anne?"
~ * ~
His friend, Christian Grieg—a stocky, square-faced man with gentle and expressive soft blue eyes—was at that moment sitting in a little restaurant called Oliver’s with a woman named Karen Duffy. He had had a close, platonic relationship with her for several years. He said, "David’s on the ragged edge."
Karen said, "And for good reason."
A waiter came over and asked if everything was okay. Karen nodded—she was a tall, lithe redhead in her late thirties, quick to smile and quick to frown—and Christian said, "Sure, everything’s good." The waiter went away.
Karen added, "I’d be at the edge, too." She paused, then went on, "I’d be over the edge, I think." She gave him a soft, quivering smile, as if in embarrassment, reached and took the last whole wheat roll from a green breadbasket at the center of the table. She said, holding it up, "You want this?"
Christian shook his head.
Karen split the roll in two with her hands and buttered one of the halves. She liked to eat. Christian thought that she ate more than he did.
He said, "I think David is suicidal."
Karen pursed her lips and set her buttered roll on her plate. "I think," she said, "that David is very depressed." She cocked her head. "You think he’s weak, don’t you? You’ve always seen him that way."
"It’s not a matter of weakness, Karen. For heaven’s sake, it’s not a matter of weakness. The kind of loss he’s had has driven other people . . ." He threw a hand into the air in frustration. He finished, "To the edge."
Karen thought a moment, then declared, "Anne was his twin sister. She wasn’t his lover. She wasn’t his wife. She wasn’t his daughter. She was his twin sister!"
"Dammit," Christian burst out, "what’s the difference, really? Sister, daughter, wife. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they were close. Very close." He could feel a fit of temper coming on and shook his head quickly to push it away. He went on, "I’m sorry, Karen. You didn’t know him. You didn’t know their relationship the way I did. They were friends, just like we are. Surely you can understand that kind of relationship. If you . . . if something happened to you, I’d probably be feeling the same way David’s feeling."
"That’s a nifty way of advancing your own argument, Christian."
He looked confusedly at her. "I don’t understand."
She sighed. "You’re right, though. I wasn’t as close to their relationship as you were. I didn’t understand it the way you apparently understand it." She picked up her roll, studied it a moment, frowned, put it back on the plate. "Can we get out of here, Christian? I’m feeling hemmed in."
"Hemmed in?" he asked. "By what?"
She answered unself-consciously. "By this conversation. Let’s go somewhere else."
Christian said, "Yes. Okay." He paused. "Let’s go and see David."
She looked at him a moment, thought of protesting, then, with a feigned smile, nodded her assent.
~ * ~
Anne Ca
se was murdered on May 9th. May 11th would have been her thirty-fifth birthday. When she awoke at 7:30—her usual waking time—on the day of her murder, she had her day planned. She was going to have a breakfast of orange juice and a rye bagel and was going to follow that with an hour’s worth of work in her vegetable garden, near the south side of the house. She was growing carrots, peas, turnips, and corn. She had been pessimistic about the corn because of bad luck with it in previous years; she blamed that bad luck on various garden pests. When she was finished in the garden, she was going to go to her study and write. She wrote poetry. It was confessional, romantic, and eminently unpublishable, but she wrote it every day, and for the same reasons, she supposed, that other people wrote journals: to keep the daily events of her life and her outlooks on life in some perspective. After that—and she usually spent a half hour or forty-five minutes at it—she was going to call her brother, David Case, to confirm that he would be coming over for lunch. Anne left her house only rarely. She was an agoraphobic. It was a nearly lifelong condition and she had stopped trying to fight it years before. Her house was her world, and that was okay. It was a very large house—one she had inherited upon the death of her mother and father, along with a substantial trust fund set aside in recognition of the fact that she could not work outside the home—and it served nicely as a universe all its own. There was a music room, a library, a sewing room, a sitting room, several bedrooms furnished in various styles, three full bathrooms, a parlor, a game room—in which she had installed a pool table, some pinball machines, and a video game called SPACE INVADERS—a cavernous kitchen and, on the third floor, what she referred to as a "ballroom." The floors there had been polished to a magnificent shine, three chandeliers put up, and a small stage built at one end. It was her habit, at least once a day, to drift into and quickly out of the ballroom, each of the bedrooms, the living room, the parlor. She enjoyed these rooms for mere moments at a time, peopled them with characters from her fantasies, and then went on to other things.
She often thought that she was eccentric, as well as agoraphobic. She had even thought, more than once, that she was insane. It was an idea that she discounted because she knew precisely why she did what she did in her big house. She did it because her house was, after all, her world. She did it because the presence of real people made her nervous, because the world outside her house made her breathless and lightheaded.
~ * ~
"I was looking at snapshots," David Case explained, then glanced behind him at Karen Duffy and Christian Grieg as he led them to his study. "Snapshots," he repeated, and gave them a quivering smile.
"Snapshots," said Karen.
"Pictures of Anne?" Christian Grieg asked, although he knew the answer.
David turned his head, nodded a little, then they were at his study. He motioned with his hand toward two brown leather chairs. Karen and Christian sat in them. David sat behind his desk. "I didn’t want any visitors today," he said. "But I’m glad you’re here."
Karen said, "Christian was worried about you."
David smiled at that, as if pleased. He said, "I’m okay. I wasn’t. Before. But I am now." He lifted his pipe from the clear glass ashtray on his desk, fingered it for a moment and set it back in the ashtray. "I know where Anne is," he said.
Christian Grieg squirmed in his chair. He knew that he was squirming and he knew that David could see him squirm, but it was all right.
David chuckled. "You’re going to enjoy this, Christian," he said. "No need to be uncomfortable."
Karen Duffy felt suddenly ill at ease. She’d known David for several years, as long as she’d known Christian, and she had grown to like him immensely. There had been a period of a month or so, early on, when she had thought that he was simply another handsome, middle-aged man who was glib and whose tastes were impeccable but who had, ultimately, all the depth and character of a TV game show host. She had changed that opinion over time. She had found him to be a very private person, yes, but also very caring, a person whose passions and emotions ran very deep and fast, but who often chose to keep tight-lipped about himself and his feelings rather than burden other people. She saw this as strength, and now, looking at him, she sensed that he was going to let that strength ebb a little, that he was going to reveal his humanness, his passion. She wasn’t sure how she would react.
David looked at her now and said, "Have you heard of ‘the other side,’ Karen?"
She answered at once, nodding nervously, "Yes, I have."
And Christian sighed, "Oh, David, for heaven’s Sake . . .”
"Don’t!" David cut in. "Please don’t, Christian. Your skepticism is not welcome or appreciated."
Christian nodded sullenly. "I’m sorry."
David said, "That’s where Anne is." He paused. "She’s on the other side."
~ * ~
In his mind’s eye, Brian Fisher saw himself putting the telephone receiver back on the hook, getting up, leaving the apartment, going somewhere. Anywhere. He saw himself forgetting what had happened, after a long while, or, failing that, putting enough time and distance between himself and what had happened that it would be nothing more than a blur, an old movie out of focus. A decade would probably accomplish that, he thought. Two decades would surely accomplish it.
Then, though there had apparently been no ringing on the other end of the line, a male voice said, "Batavia Police Department, complaint desk," and Brian said at once—as if he were courtesy-bound to respond—"Hello, yes. My name is Brian Fisher." He could say no more.
"Go on," coaxed the male voice.
Brian said nothing.
"Could you state your name again, please," said the male voice.
Brian repeated his name but could say no more. "Is this an emergency, Mr. Fisher?"
"I don’t think so," Brian said.
"Then what is the nature of your complaint, sir?"
"I had a friend," Brian answered. "Her name was Anne." He paused, let the words pile up, then let them come spilling out. "Her name was Anne, she’s dead now, she was murdered, and I caused it." He waited. There was a moment’s silence. Then the male voice said, with more of a sense of urgency now, "That was Fisher, F-I-S-"
Brian hung up.
TWO
Nobody’s questioning the reality of your experience," said Christian Grieg.
David Case nodded from behind his desk. "That’s big of you, Christian." He tried a grin, found it uncomfortable. "How can you question it? You were there, for God’s sake!"
Christian leaned forward in the brown leather chair and clasped his hands. He said slowly, as if reminding David of something David had forgotten, "I wasn’t there, I was in the boat, sure. And I was in the hospital; I was in your room. But I wasn’t there, on the other side, with you."
Karen Duffy, trying hard not to sound peeved, said, "Please tell me what you’re talking about."
Christian glanced at her, then nodded at David and explained, "David had an . . . out-of-body experience—"
David interrupted. "That’s not technically correct. You’re talking about astral projection when you use that phrase and that’s not what happened to me. What happened to me, technically . . .” He sighed. "The experience I had was a death experience." Another uncomfortable grin appeared and quickly faded. He shook his head and looked at Karen. "I died. My heart stopped. I died." He paused. "And I went over to what is commonly called ‘the other side.’ "
Karen said nothing. She was confused. She looked from David to Christian and then back to David, who continued, "It was a boating accident. Christian and I and some friends were out on Oneida Lake. I fell overboard. I was drunk—I was getting drunk," he corrected, "and I went under. It was fifteen minutes before they fished me out—Christian and the others. That’s a long time." He was clearly having difficulty telling the story. He looked away often—at his desk, at the window. "That’s a long time," he repeated, as if to himself. "And while I was under . . . " He paused. When he continued, his mood and tone wer
e more thoughtful. "It began then, while I was under. Classic stuff, really." He got his pipe from the glass ashtray on his desk, lost hold of it; it fell to the desktop and spilled a pinch of blackened tobacco. He stared at the spilled tobacco a moment, swept it into his hand and dumped it into the ashtray. "Classic stuff," he repeated. "And I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, Karen."
A hard thumping noise came from the window. The three people in the room looked over. The window was clear. David explained, "It’s birds. They fly into the window. I don’t know why." He got up, went to the window, looked down through it, glanced back. Christian and Karen still were seated. They were looking expectantly at him. "It’s a finch," he said and went back and sat at his desk.
"A finch?" Karen asked. "You mean it’s dead?"
Before David could answer, Christian said, "You could put up a bird silhouette, a hawk silhouette. That would keep them away from the window."
"I’ll do that," David said. He glanced at the window. "Anne told me the same thing. She had the same problem. She said a dozen birds flew into her window—the one in her kitchen; it’s a small window, in her kitchen, over the sink—and the birds flew into it when she was washing dishes. So she put up a silhouette. Yes, I think it was the silhouette of a hawk. A sparrow hawk." He stopped. He shook his head miserably. "Dammit, I miss her. Why would someone do that to her, Christian? I don’t know why anyone would do that to her! I’ve tried to figure it out and I can’t figure it out! You knew her, you both knew her, you knew her problem, and now there she is—she’s still at the morgue, she’s still at the damned morgue, and she has no home."
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