by Eric Flint
—I am standing.
I'm standing and dressed as if my Anderson & Shepard double-breasted suit, Holl shirt, green silk tie and Ramon Torres ostrich-skin loafers have become part of me: loose flags of tattooed flesh. The DeSoto—an antique bought for too much a few years ago out of a misguided humor—is a crushed accordion; but then, even as I assess this, it becomes in a flicker exactly what it was before the accident: well-restored, cleaned, and serviced. I wedge my way in there. The door clangs on me. I always thought of this DeSoto as a refuge, which I could take anywhere and be free, a refuge against my life itself; but the difficulty is that I was wholly deluded, I could never have been free in this car, any more than I could have been free anywhere. More than physical reconstitution is being managed here.
I had exited through the side window, I remember, and been impaled on a sheer metal rail torn from the frame. Somehow being crucified had felt, still feels, right and just. As we were in life, so we are in death. Not that in being crucified I had any great heights from which to fall.
But here I start the engine and I drive away. There is no one to stop me or even notice.
Life—or rather death—is filled with possibility and in fact promise. Indeed, perhaps I am alive after all. Maybe this is merely a concussion. Perhaps I am being given another chance or simply misunderstood the situation. I feel a surge of gratitude to whatever source has accomplished this, although I do not believe in the existence of a higher, controlling intelligence. I do not in fact believe anything except the sound of the big engine throbbing, the soft clatter of radial tires, the soughing of wind flowing wretchedly, and the ubiquitous, infinitely gray LA freeway extending forever, sprawling, launching me.
Home, I think, go home. Take me home, you poor dumb, dead Dante. Go home to your own Beatrice. Go home to Janice and fuck your brains out.
I had not realized that dying would make me so horny. My erection presses against the tautness, this post-traumatic erection warm and pulsing. Take me home, I think.
It shouldn't be long because there isn't another car going either way on the six-lane highway. There is just grayness, the median strip and the DeSoto.
And, of course, me.
Horny as hell and dead as road-kill.
* * *
Trees blur, the highway blurs, all passage blurs, but in the car death makes all these spaces warm and safe. I am not so much driving as being driven, and outside the barren highway has become a vast tent pitched over desire. I think of Janice, of all I had wanted to say and would have if I had known where the DeSoto would bring me that morning . . . but it is not so much the saying as the doing which overtakes. I want to screw her, enter her very heart, create an erection so enormous that it will touch and dangerously displace her heart. An erection so enormous—impelled by death, by that hangman's noose draped now upon me—that it will reach to her center. Small puffs of cartoon steam seem to purr from my groin, the little abscess of the car fills with steam, and I think of Janice lying against me, of the sounds which I helped her make.
Oh, it was all such a long time ago.
Suspended, then, hanging in that space, the soundless gel of the car dense and swaddling, I find at the center of my new purpose raw necessity and past that an agenda. I have plans. I have clearly defined plans, even for a dead man. Never in fact have I had so many plans as those which now assault me at this moment: a little schedule of accommodation that will be met, places to be revisited, contacts to be made, but all of that only after Janice, after the screwing. Death congeals into a helpful arrangement of priorities.
Lights prowl the highway; I seem to have been overtaken by light, and I think of myself again as a figure in a cartoon, steam from the pants, lights through the window, hurt in the head. At the end of this journey: Janice, and with her the commencement of true and meaningful plans, which will then vault me past all this and into a newer life (or colder death) more certain than any I have ever known.
In that suspended place, fixed on anticipation, but placed now only in that deadly quiet, it is as if my father appears in the car, seated beside me, legs casually crossed, eyes staring madly through the windshield. His hands flutter with what surely must be the effort of travel.
He is pretty much, the old man, as I remember him on his deathbed twenty years ago, although certainly in a more advanced state of composition. Still, for a corpse, he looks terrific. He has retained most of his hair, and the mad light in his eyes shows an uncharacteristic enthusiasm. He was always distracted. He always had places to go. He was always half out of the room even when he was in the room. "How are you doing?" he would ask, and his lips would move, and he would stare at his watch, at the door. "Well, that's very good," he would say. "We must discuss this later."
But now he seems more sedentary, fixated in a way he never was before. "It isn't going to work," he says, "I know exactly what you're planning, but it can't happen. There's a catch to the whole business. I mean, you can come back, but you can't come, if you follow what I'm saying here." He coughs, shrugs his shoulders and stares out the side window. "There isn't enough speed to save. Believe me, I have been here for almost twenty years now, and I haven't been able to change a thing. Not in me, not in the situation."
"So what do you want?" I ask,. our first conversation in almost two decades. "Why are you here? If there isn't enough speed to save, why did you come back?"
"I didn't come back," he says. "You call this coming back? I'm just filling in the time. Dead is dead, a big hammer on the head. Then you just try to amuse yourself."
"A hammer? Whose hammer?"
"I told you not to marry that woman, didn't I? She's too cold for you, always complaining. I know the type. Saw it early."
"It didn't seem that way at the start," I say.
Die in a highway crash, get resurrected to live a partial after life and what do you find? You find your father beside you, questioning your judgment as if forty years had not passed.
"Dad," I say, "You live your life the best you can. It's not for anyone to judge."
"You've judged me every moment of your existence. You never let it go, never." He shakes his head, shakes his hands and peers out the window, squinting. "Sons of bitches. They promised fifteen minutes and now I have to go back after five? Well, what the hell is the difference? I couldn't ever tell you anything anyway."
"I listened to everything you had to say."
"And laughed at it," he says, distracted. "I told you about that woman. I could have saved you most of it. Also if you weren't driving antique junk, and if you had checked your brake fluid level, which I remind you should be part of your ordinary life, you would have had enough torque to spin out of it instead of driving right into that bus. But no matter," my father says, "No matter, you were ready to end it all anyway."
And he dematerializes.
Gone, the father! He has disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as he had arrived, and through the windshield I can see the familiar dead-white strip malls that form the gateway to my neighborhood. Surely at this moment Janice is also there, waiting, beginning to worry, some faint sliver of warning neutralizing her restlessness and contempt, bringing her alert to the inference that this is not an ordinary evening. I think of her anger, throbbing at the margins and wonder if my lustful dead thoughts are simply part of the common apparatus of death itself.
Into the drive, off the engine, trudge from the DeSoto, and I enter the blue glazed front door of our Greek revival home on Antioch Avenue . . . perfect Antioch Avenue with its huge lawns and blue-glazed swimming pools and just underneath, the trembling reach of the unspeakable. The unspeakable here or there, it is one Earth, isn't it?"
"I'm home," I say coming through the door, and Janice steps from the study that aligns the dining room and blinks at me.
"Oh," she says. "You're here after all. I was worrying, I didn't know—"
"Didn't know what?" I say. "What didn't you know?" She is flawless, staring back at me: white, white and gold, al
l of this streaming from her; and I notice that she's wearing the heart-link ankle bracelet I had given her when we were engaged, and that she is barefoot.
"Pregnant and barefoot," I mumble, grinning. Death has seemingly energized me at this moment: I feel free and light and young—yes, light as in weightless, but I can perceive the numinous light around me, the world itself glowing.
It occurs to me that this must after all be heaven and that Janice—the best version of her I have seen in years—must be a wingless big-breasted cherub. An Angel.
"I'm not pregnant, Nathan." But she stands stock-still, thinking. "Although I suppose I could get pregnant here. I don't know that it has ever happened, but there's always a first time." She giggles.
"What didn't you know?" I ask again, determined.
"That you were dead," she says matter-of-factly, as if I died everyday. "You don't look dead, not really."
"Neither do you."
She smiles, that perfect, placid, oceanic smile that I first fell in love with when she appeared in a shaft of light at a Sunday afternoon cocktail party. "Oh, I'm very dead, my darling. You'll learn."
"What will I learn?"
"That being dead is alive." Another smile and she steps toward me, arms extended. I respond reflexively. I can smell her perfume; surprisingly, I can feel her, and then suddenly I am standing alone as if not I but she had just dreamed that moment and torn the dream away. She is standing before me, looking sadly at me, as if . . . as if I'd died.
"You're not very substantial," she says.
"Well, you look pretty substantial to me," I say, and I move toward her then, put my arms around her, and I feel a slight vibration in the touch of her skin, at the touch of her dress—but it is a memory. I am not so much touching then as recollecting touch. I don't so much feel as stumble toward some recollection of that; and I inhale, trying to breathe in her scent, her perfume.
But there is only emptiness. Remembering how she smells, I cannot quite move past that thin perception. Stripped of erection and desire, I am flooded by memory alone.
She pulls away from me, pity in her eyes. "You're not quite dead," she says, "are you?"
Well, yes, I am. So it would seem. Senselessly, numbingly, flaccidly dead. Nothing there but doomed assertion, dead in the exposed light.
There is nothing to say. I turn and leave the house. "Where are you going?" she asks, "Do you really think that this is the answer?" Her voice is bright, tinkles like that of a hostess. A tour guide for the underworld.
There is no answer, I think, but I do not say this.
Now there are some who might say that it is humiliating to be sexually rejected by one's own wife, particularly if one is dead and represents, then, no threat—but, on the other hand, being not quite dead can have a depressing effect upon congress. Janice's position, tilted that way, is certainly justifiable; conjunction would be a spooky position. Also the news that I am not quite dead has apparently become common knowledge. So Janice would, however unfairly, be viewed as some sort of variation of a necrophile. There is no possibility that she could in the aftermath pretend she thought I was completely dead. "How could I be expected to know the difference?" just isn't a valid excuse.
Little puffs of dust and steam encircle my shoes as I trudge to the DeSoto in which I died (or half-died), knowing that once again I am justifying Janice, granting her excuse for the inexcusable.
There is, after all, the matter of commitment. Death would not buy her out of marital obligation any more than it would buy her out of claiming the Estate. This thought, in its ugly practicality, impels me ever more rapidly; but I find as I near the DeSoto that it is not quite in the abandoned state of its desertion. It is, instead, encircled by a crowd, some of them strangers, others dimly remembered, college classmates or colleagues, a quick and scattered roster of my career. They stare at me bleakly, gesture, whisper to one another of my presence. More strangeness this, as I raise a hand. "Are you living or dead?" I ask. "Where is this happening?"
No reply. They do hear me, it would seem. My father comes up from the rear, puts a confidential, paternal arm around my neck and shoulders and guides me to the car. "You might as well get out of here," he says. "There's nothing more for you in these places."
"Why? How do you know that?"
"Because I'm your father, obviously. Because before you were here I had checked out the situation. Believe me, I know this territory better than you. It's a stinker."
"So what does that make you?"
"It makes me exactly what you always took me to be . . . that man you could never understand. You're not going to understand it here either. You know why? Because death doesn't make you any wiser. It may give you the last word, but you're still no smarter. Am I right?" He gestures to the crowd. "Tell him I'm right. He never listened to me."
They look at him without interest. Someone in the middle—it must be fat Jack my first mentor who taught me every expense-account trick I know—makes a derisive sound. "You tell him," Fat Jack says. "You keep him on the straight."
"I knew that man," I say. "That man taught me everything I know, and everything I know is wrong."
"Don't change the subject," my father says. "Face the bench, kid, they're going to pronounce the sentence."
"You changed the subject all my damned life," I say, pushing him aside and yanking open the car door. Cushions ooze toward me like blood as I move behind the wheel. I have absolutely no idea where I am going or what I might think this means. "You never settled on anything; you were never home."
"Well, then, you studied me well. The same applies, son. For one thing, you can't even decide if you're dead."
It is a strange thing to consider at this moment but never, I think, have we communicated quite so well. Death seems to bring a higher state of alertness, although it is no good for sex. "Fat Jack and advertising ruined your brains, son," my old man says. "They turned you into a louse."
Fat Jack had forced me to the l958 DeSoto. Working the campaigns for an auto manufacturer, I had come to understand that the engineers had surrendered to the stylists, the cars—which Fat Jack taught me to insidiously undersell, no campaign makes explicit promises when the unsaid could be anything—had profound defects. Steering wasn't balanced properly for front wheel drive and overcompensating drivers would receive their final reward by being hurled through a guardrail or off a mountain. I'd better drive something old and heavy, I thought. If we're lying like this then all of them are lying, and then all of these new cars are killers.
The scandal had been building in my last weeks there; someone had turned over internal memos to the Government.
But it was I in the l958 DeSoto who went hurtling first . . .
Well, this time I will be more cautious. Assume nothing, protect everything. Cautiously engaging the ignition, dropping the car into gear, I call from memory all of my considerable driving skills, all of the weight and simultaneity of memory.
The gathered crowd salutes me with curses as I move the car, my own gestures beseeching them to move fade to inconsequence as I turn cautiously toward the highway entrance a hundred yards from my house. Auburn City-link Highway, one of the great conveniences, although the heat and dust of near traffic on summer weekends was occasionally unbearable. Behind me, like memory itself, the house; ahead of me the highway.
Driving, I think of the nature of death and the nature of being alive and wonder if there is any difference, or whether it is merely a matter of perception. On some of those intense summer nights, traffic streaming from upstate to the corridors of downtown, Janice and I would close the windows, swaddle ourselves while naked in the dangerous air conditioning, and exchange confidences as we exchanged with one another. I could at those times feel the world burning. Surely if that had happened, it could happen again. "We lift above the night, we are Shiva, consumer of worlds," I would whisper. Did we? Could we?
It seemed plausible at the time . . .
But what is plausible now is Highway #9W,
that dangerous road: two lanes, blind turns, no-passing zones occurring and recurring like strobes. 9W which I fight with all the tenacity of the newly dead until, sprinting from a blind curve, I find a sports car oncoming in my lane, sliding quite helplessly toward impact. I yank the wheel and dive for the shoulder, that small, pale strip overhanging a suddenly disastrous cliff, and just like last time the car loses purchase and slides past the shoulder and into the air.
But unlike last time, I am able to find a thread of traction before the wheels definitively soar from the ground. But I know better now. I force myself to stop trying to intercede, to control the event. I allow the car to resume its slide off the road into emptiness. It is a terrifying yet exhilarating drop to that clang of rage and fused metal. The car bounces, tears, collapses around me, and then is still.