Another Life

by Robert Haller

  When Ian returned to the room, he was holding a large squarish bottle of amber-colored liquor, a half-full two-liter of Diet Coke, and two glasses of ice. He looked excited as he sat down on the edge of the bed, put the bottles and glasses on the table, and started pouring.

  “All I could find in the basement was Jim Beam,” he said as he offered me a glass. “Still, better than nothing, right?”

  “Right,” I said, taking my drink.

  “Cheers,” said Ian, and we clinked our glasses. I didn’t know how much to drink, and I panicked and downed it. Ian, who had taken only a sip, stared. “I didn’t know I was dealing with a certified alcoholic here.”

  My chest burned, but I liked it. I handed him my glass. “Can I have another?”

  My head felt fuzzy as Ian went through his laptop and decided what to listen to. “I’m in the mood for Sonic Youth. But what album? I think Sister is their best. How about you?”

  I wanted him to shut up so we could start kissing again. I thought I’d be better at it now that my head felt light and my body felt warm and relaxed—or at least, I would enjoy it more. I put my hand on his arm. “Can we listen to the Seizures?” I asked. I wanted to hear Paul Frazier’s voice.

  Ian looked up at me. “Perfect.”

  As the heavy sound of Paul’s guitar filled up the room, and then the rough, ragged wail of his voice joined in, I finished my third drink, and Ian began stroking my hair. When he started kissing my neck, I couldn’t keep from giggling. He looked up at me. “What? You don’t like that?”

  “No, I do,” I lied. “I guess I’m just ticklish.” Then I took his face in my hands and began kissing him on the lips again, using my tongue to feel his tongue, tasting the whiskey and the Coke. This is why people drink, I thought. It makes so much sense.

  I closed my eyes. Paul Frazier’s voice was ringing in my ears, his music beating against my body. I pictured kissing Paul in his car that night. I pictured him kissing me back. Alone in that car, in front of my house. Paul would be a good kisser; he had to be. And what about Martin? How would he kiss? I’d imagined kissing Martin before, in my bed after sitting up late chatting with him online, before I drifted off to sleep. I knew how he would be: attentive and gentle, but confident. He’d smell like an older man’s cologne, and his cheeks would be just a bit rough from his five o’clock shadow.

  On the bed, Ian pulled away from me, panting slightly. “Jesus,” he said, but he was grinning.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked impatiently.

  “Nothing.”

  “Good.” I pulled him close. When we kissed, and only when we kissed, Martin would take off his glasses, revealing the startling blue of his eyes—or were they brown? I suddenly couldn’t remember. I tried to think back to the pictures, but the color wouldn’t come to me. His hand was on the back of my neck now, and then the other was over my shirt, learning the shape of my breast. I imagined Martin, then Paul. My eyes were still closed. I ran my hand through his hair. I fell back on the bed and pulled him with me. We were moving fast against each other. Breathing hard, I pressed my body even closer to his. Then suddenly, I felt it—a change, as if the air had been sucked out of him. I continued to kiss him, quickly, almost roughly, trying to pull him back to me, but it was no use. I had no choice but to open my eyes. “What?” I said, but he was looking down at himself, and suddenly I understood. We both pulled away from each other and sat up.

  “Just give me ten minutes,” said Ian. His face was beet red, and I suddenly didn’t want to be anywhere near him. Paul and Martin were gone. It was just me and this boy I hardly even knew. I didn’t know where any of it had come from, what had woken up inside my body, but it scared me. I got up off the bed and almost collapsed. My knees were so weak, I had to put a hand on the bed to steady myself. Then I knelt and began putting on my shoes.

  “Where are you going?” Ian asked.

  “Home,” I said, tying my laces to avoid looking at him.

  “Seriously? Just give me ten minutes.”

  “I think it’s better if I just go now.”

  “That’s not what you were saying five minutes ago.”

  I looked up from my shoes. His eyes were hard and ugly. “I’m aware of that,” I said.

  Suddenly, he was embarrassed. “It happens to a lot of guys. It’s normal,” he muttered, and looked down at the bed.

  “I never said it wasn’t.”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t come on like a fucking maniac,” he said, still not looking at me. “Maybe if you’d let me take my time.”

  “What?” I stood up, feeling dizzy. I had a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach: the opposite of waking up out of a nightmare into reality—the sensation that things you thought you’d done dreaming, you had, in fact, done wide awake.

  Finally, he looked up at me. “I should have known all you Christian girls are repressed sex psychos. You’re all just a bunch of horny sluts.”

  I felt water rising to my eyes. “That’s really mean.”

  “Truth hurts.”

  “Go to hell.”

  I whirled around and went to the door, but I couldn’t leave, not like that. I needed to claim at least something. I marched back over to the bed, and the expression on Ian’s face was a mixture of hope and terror, then confusion, as I grabbed the quarter of a bottle of bourbon from the table. “I’ll be taking this,” I said, holding it up with one hand and placing the other on my hip. “Guess I’ll see you around the schoolyard.” I didn’t know why I said this—it was an outdated expression I’d only ever heard my mom use. Before Ian could say or do anything, I walked out of the room and shut the door behind me. Then I ran down the stairs, through the living room, past the blaring TV and the guy lying on the couch, through the dirty kitchen, and out the front door into the summer evening.

  I took the back way home. Holding the bottle by the neck, I walked fast down State Street until I came to the Green Meadows apartment complex and cut through the parking lot and past the apartments into the sprawling green field behind it. The evening air was still and warm, the sky was a deep, dark blue, and the stars were appearing as I walked through the field and took a long swig from the bottle. I coughed and wiped my mouth. After the second drink, my chest began to burn and my head regained that dizzy, weightless feeling I’d had in Ian’s bedroom. The crickets sounded rhythmic and hypnotic. I lay down in the long grass in the middle of the field and tried to look up at the stars, but I gave up after the bugs began biting me.

  I thought I heard a rustle behind me and turned, but there was just the empty field and the low shadows of the apartments in the distance. I started walking, and again I heard something coming up fast behind me. When I whirled around, there was nothing, not even anywhere for a pursuer to hide.

  “Ian?” I whispered, but I knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t Ian. I stood there, listening to myself breathe, and took another long gulp from the whiskey. I turned and began to walk again, singing one of Paul’s songs to myself—the only slow one: Went looking for you last night, got lost studying the pavement cracks, just like the Lord Jesus, I know that you’re not coming back … After that, I sang “Jesus Loves Me.” Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so … and trailed off because I couldn’t remember any more. And the thing followed me all the way through the field, and I let it. I didn’t even hurry, almost daring it to catch me, but when I got to the end of the field and was back on Grant Street, I couldn’t hear it anymore and told myself it had just been the alcohol.

  Standing on Grant Street, I looked at the nearly empty bottle of whiskey. I looked around me. The street was quiet. I lifted the bottle over my head and hurled it. It landed on the road but didn’t break. I picked it up and threw it again, harder this time. The sound it made as it shattered into pieces made me jump. I ran headlong in the opposite direction, toward my house.

  The house was dark a
nd quiet when I came in. All the lights were off. My footsteps sounded intrusive as I walked through the kitchen and living room and went up the stairs.

  I half expected him not to be there when I knocked on the door, that the house would be empty—the rapture had happened, and I’d been left behind.

  “Yeah?”

  I’d never been so relieved to hear my brother’s voice.

  I opened the door. Jason was in front of his TV, playing a video game, an open bag of Doritos next to him on the floor.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “In her room,” he answered without looking at me. “She’s sick, remember?”

  I’d been gone for hours now, but she hadn’t tried to call me. She hadn’t even noticed. Nobody had noticed.

  I wanted to ask him what he’d had for dinner. I wasn’t remotely hungry. I felt dizzy and sick but felt I should have the option. Whenever my mom was too sick to make dinner, she would give us money to order a pizza, or give me instructions to reheat leftovers. I didn’t trust my voice, though; my tongue lay heavy and sluggish in my mouth.

  “Dinner?” I managed.

  Jason just held up his bag of Doritos. Then he looked at me for the first time since I opened the door. “You sound weird,” he said. “Where were you, anyway? I thought you were sick.”

  “I am sick,” I said, keeping it short so my brother wouldn’t hear me slur, and closed the door.

  I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on the fan. Under its heavy roar, I vomited into the toilet. I swirled mouthwash around in my mouth. I brushed my teeth. I looked in the mirror and grinned at myself. In my room, I took off my dirty clothes, and changed into shorts and a tank top. Then I got on my bed, opened my laptop, and told Martin I wanted to meet.

  PAUL

  For the first few days after Paul Frazier’s return to Grover Falls, his mother had mostly ignored his disheveled appearance, his self-imposed seclusion in his room during the day, and his propensity to answer her in monosyllables. “You must be tired,” she would say almost hopefully as he passed her in the hallway from the bathroom. He would pause long enough to nod before retreating into his room. It wasn’t as if he were lying.

  Paul didn’t remember exactly how many days it was—three? five?—before Sharon burst into his room without knocking one day around noon, marched over to the window by his bed, and pulled up the shades, flooding his world with harsh bright light.

  She sat down on the end of the bed and said, “I know you’re sad, but you can’t go on like this forever.”

  He remembered wondering why he couldn’t. In the city, his bouts of anxiety had felt like an unwanted visitor, an intruder who had hijacked his life and taken him places he didn’t want to go and made him do things he didn’t want to do. But here in his old town, in his old bedroom, the anxiety seemed to have stabilized into something that felt not only manageable but maybe even appropriate. What else was he supposed to do in this place besides sleep?

  But his mom had been insistent. So he reluctantly explained to her a little bit about how he felt. He spoke of how, if he thought about certain things too long, his chest would tighten up and make even breathing difficult; how even though he was in bed for most of the day, actual sleep was more elusive than ever, a fleeting visitor who could stay no more than an hour at a time; how, even when he did sleep, he had dreams so vivid and frightening that staying awake almost felt more restful.

  His mom had been adamant about taking action. Paul, already leery of his mother’s return to faith, had feared a proposal involving some spiritual intervention—a prayer session at her church, or a visit from the pastor. But Sharon’s proposition was much more practical. She wanted him to see a doctor.

  After writing prescriptions (Klonopin for the anxiety attacks, and Cymbalta to up his serotonin levels), Dr. Schumer said that much of Paul’s anxiety stemmed from “feelings of powerlessness and lack of control regarding an unknown future.” Hell, he didn’t need a shrink to tell him that. He had always been that way. It was one of Paul’s distinguishing characteristics that the happier he was, the less time he spent thinking about the future. Or maybe it was the other way around: the more successful he was in avoiding thoughts of the future, the happier he felt. But in either case, didn’t it follow that when the unknowable future no longer felt important, when instead the immediate, here-and-now reality became the focus, Paul’s anxiety would then melt away like slush in the rays of a hot sun?

  There was no air-conditioning in New Life’s sanctuary, so Paul had spent the afternoon setting up giant industrial fans in the windows above the gym’s bleachers. But even at seven in the evening, with eight fans blasting, the room was thick and heavy with the smell of perspiration, and he could see dark stains under the congregants’ armpits.

  Paul sat in his usual spot in the sound booth, high in the back of the gym. Here, he had a bird’s-eye view of the congregation. During a normal service, people talked and whispered to each other, and babies and toddlers squawked and fidgeted. But tonight, as the last chords of the worship song died away and Jon Newman put down his guitar and left the stage, the room was silent. All eyes were fixed on the stage, where Pastor Eric and the prophet, Dr. Sheldon Langston, stood. Two empty chairs were set up in front of them, and in the heavy silence, Pastor Eric cleared his throat and spoke into his mike: “May I have Mary Reed come up here, please?”

  A middle-aged woman Paul recognized but had never spoken to got up from her seat in the congregation and walked up onto the stage, where she sat down in one of the empty chairs and bowed her head. Pastor Eric and Dr. Langston each laid a hand on one of her shoulders, and the hush remained over the room as they closed their eyes and bowed their heads in silent prayer. After a minute of this, Paul began to wonder whether this was all the “prophetic ministry” was—a glorified prayer meeting—but then Dr. Langston began to speak.

  “Lord, we thank you for this sister in Christ. We thank you for her patience, for her diligence. The word that comes to my mind for you, sister, is long-suffering. You are a woman who has known long suffering. Yes, Father, and the Lord would say unto you that he recognizes your faithfulness, he has not forgotten about you, praise Jesus, and now he is bringing you up into a new place of fruitfulness, a new place of victory, as you continue to serve the Lord, praise Jesus!”

  A low rumble of assent stirred through the crowd.

  “And the Lord would say unto you, do not be afraid, sister, as you come into this new place in your life. When the Lord calls you into his waters of grace and truth, do not be afraid to jump in with both feet, sister. Do not be afraid to dive right in, praise Jesus!”

  “Amens” and “Praise the Lords” emerged intermittently here and there in the congregation.

  Paul began to feel something in the room—a pulsing energy as palpable as it was impossible to pin down. And as the night continued and more members of the congregation came up to be prophesied over, sometimes individually, sometimes as a couple or family, he felt himself growing more and more agitated. But it wasn’t because he found the idea of an old man’s rambling being taken as the “Word of God” weird, which he did—weird, ludicrous, and probably dangerous. It wasn’t because, as the night wore on, the mood in the room became increasingly strange and emotional. (Paul saw a woman sobbing uncontrollably in her chair, and one of the elders stand up and begin “speaking in tongues”—chanting out one long torrent of unintelligible speech, which everyone not only seemed to find perfectly normal, but actually welcomed.) It was because every one of Dr. Langston’s pronouncements, although they might touch on the past, always ended up focusing on the individual’s future. And Paul, who had successfully been keeping thoughts of the future at bay for a string of consecutive days now, didn’t appreciate being so forcefully and repeatedly reminded of it.

  As a way of keeping himself calm, Paul tried to tune out Dr. Langston’s words to a low
hum and scanned the congregation till he found her, sitting in her usual spot on the left side of the gym. All he could see was the back of her head, but it was enough. He kept his eyes there and struggled to keep his thoughts there, also, with her, the only safe refuge he had left.

  Four days ago, when Paul had stumbled out of April Swanson’s bedroom window and into her backyard late Sunday morning, his attention went immediately to the bird feeder dangling from a small maple in the middle of the lawn. A bright, sharp-tongued blue jay was chasing away all the smaller birds, the sparrows and finches and chickadees, not allowing them to partake in the feast. It would sit on the feeder, pecking sporadically, and whenever another bird ventured close, it would fly off its perch screeching, and chase the newcomer away. Paul was fascinated. Were all blue jays assholes, or was this guy some kind of anomaly? Paul realized he didn’t know anything about birds. He would have to look up blue jays when he got home. But for now, he decided this wasn’t the time or place to take up birdwatching as a hobby, and he walked quickly to the end of the yard, hopped the fence, and doubled back to Grant Street for his car.

  Paul felt good. Driving through town, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and bobbed his head to nonexistent music. In that moment, he could have listened to the Beach Boys without a trace of irony. He felt he had been at the edge of some precipice, about to fall (or jump), and at the last possible moment, someone had yanked him back from the brink. It was not unlike the feeling he got the morning after those nights of heavy partying, when the worst of the hangover had subsided and he crawled out of bed to find texts from friends proposing brunch. On those lazy afternoons filled with bacon and omelets, and anecdotes of the night before already being woven into mythologies, Paul always felt the most grateful to be alive. Remembering 3 a.m., when he had retreated drunkenly into the darkest caverns of himself; remembering the blistering headache he had awoken to earlier that morning, he could only feel glad that now he was here with his friends, in a Brooklyn diner, dousing his food in maple syrup, relatively unscathed. You had to get drunk to appreciate being sober.