*
Chad finished Living with the Animals in July, writing the last fifty pages in a nine-day burst. He sent it to the agent. Emails and phone calls followed. Chad said Ringling seemed enthusiastic. If so, Nora thought he must have saved most of that enthusiasm for the phone calls. What she saw in the two emails was cautious optimism at best.
In August, at Ringling's request, Chad did some rewriting. He was quiet about this part of the work, a sign that it wasn't going particularly well. But he stuck to it. Nora hardly noticed. She was absorbed with her garden.
In September, Chad insisted on going to New York and pacing Ringling's office while the man made phone calls to the seven publishers to whom the manuscript had gone, hoping some of them would express an interest in meeting with the author. Nora thought about visiting a bar in Montpelier and picking someone up--they could go to a Motel 6--and didn't. It seemed like too much work for too little gain. She worked in her garden instead.
It was just as well. Chad flew back that evening instead of spending the night in New York as he had planned. He was drunk. He also professed to be happy. They had a handshake deal on the book with a good publisher. He named the publisher. She had never heard of it.
"How much?" she asked.
"That doesn't really matter, babe." Doesn't came out dushn't, and he only called her babe when he was drunk. "They really love the book, and that's what matters." Mattersh. She realized that when Chad was drunk, he sounded quite a bit like Winnie in the first months after Winnie's stroke.
"How much?"
"Forty thousand dollars." Dollarsh.
She laughed. "I probably made that much before I got from the bench to the playground. I figured it out the first time we watched--"
She didn't see the blow coming and didn't really feel it hit. There was a kind of big click in her head, that was all. Then she was lying on the kitchen floor, breathing through her mouth. She had to breathe through her mouth. He had broken her nose.
"You bitch!" he said, starting to cry.
Nora sat up. The kitchen seemed to make a large drunken circle around her before steadying. Blood pattered down on the linoleum. She was amazed, in pain, exhilarated, full of shame and hilarity.
I sure didn't see that one coming, she thought.
"That's right, blame me," she said. Her voice was foggy, hooting. "Blame me and then cry your stupid little eyes out."
He cocked his head as if he hadn't heard her--or couldn't believe what he'd heard--then made a fist and drew it back.
She raised her face, her now crooked nose leading the way. There was a beard of blood on her chin. "Go on," she said. "It's the only thing you're halfway good at."
"How many men have you slept with since that day? Tell me!"
"Slept with none. Fucked a dozen." A lie, actually. There had only been the cop and an electrician who'd come one day while Chad was in town. "Lay on, McDuff."
Instead of laying on, he opened his fist and let his hand drop to his side. "The book would have been fine if not for you." He shook his head as if to clear it. "That's not exactly right, but you know what I mean."
"You're drunk."
"I'm going to leave you and write another one. A better one."
"Pigs will whistle."
"You wait," he said, as tearfully childish as a little boy who has just lost in a schoolyard scuffle. "You just wait and see."
"You're drunk. Go to bed."
"You poison bitch."
Having delivered himself of this, he shuffled off to bed, walking with his head down. He even walked like Winnie after his stroke.
Nora thought about going to Urgent Care for her nose, but was too tired to think of a story that would have just the right touch of veracity. In her heart--her nursely heart--she knew there was no such story. They would see through her no matter how good her story was. When it came to things like this, ER personnel always did.
She stuffed cotton up her nose and took two Tylenol with codeine. Then she went outside and weeded her garden until it was too dark to see. When she went inside, Chad was snoring on the bed. He had taken his shirt off, but his pants were still on. She thought he looked like a fool. This made her feel like crying, but she didn't.
*
He left her and went back to New York. Sometimes he emailed, and sometimes she emailed back. He didn't ask for his half of the remaining money, which was good. She wouldn't have given it to him. She had worked for that money and was still working with it, feeding it into the bank little by little, paying off the house. He said in his emails that he was subbing again and writing on the weekends. She believed him about the subbing but not about the writing. His emails had a strengthless, washed-out feeling that suggested he might not have much left when it came to writing. She'd always thought he was pretty much a one-book man, anyway.
She took care of the divorce herself. She found everything she needed on the Internet. There were papers she needed him to sign, and he signed them. They came back with no note attached.
*
The following summer--a good one; she was working full-time at the local hospital and her garden was an absolute riot--she was browsing in a used bookstore one day and came across a volume she had seen in Winnie's study: The Basis of Morality. It was a pretty beat-up copy, and she was able to take it home for two dollars, plus tax.
It took her the rest of the summer and most of the fall to read it cover-to-cover. In the end she was disappointed. There was little or nothing in it she did not already know.
For Jim Sprouse
I think that most people tend to meditate more on What Comes Next as they get older, and since I'm now in my late sixties, I qualify in that regard. Several of my short stories and at least one novel (Revival) have approached this question. I can't say "have dealt with it," because that implies some conclusion, and none of us can really draw one, can we? Nobody has sent back any cell phone video from the land of death. There's faith, of course (and a veritable deluge of "heaven is real" books), but faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof.
When you boil it down, there are only two choices. Either there's Something, or there's Nothing. If it's the latter, case closed. If it's the former, there are myriad possibilities, with heaven, hell, purgatory, and reincarnation being the most popular on the Afterlife Hit Parade. Or maybe you get what you always believed you would get. Maybe the brain is equipped with a deeply embedded exit program that starts running just as everything else is running down, and we're getting ready to catch that final train. To me, the reports of near-death experiences tend to support this idea.
What I'd like--I think--is a chance to go through it all again, as a kind of immersive movie, so I could relish the good times and good calls, like marrying my wife and our decision to have that third child. Of course I'd also have to rue the bad calls (I've made my share), but who wouldn't like to reexperience that first good kiss, or have a chance to relax and really enjoy the wedding ceremony that went by in such a nervous blur?
This story isn't about such a rerun--not exactly--but musing about the possibility led me to write about one man's afterlife. The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot.
Afterlife
William Andrews, an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, dies on the afternoon of September 23, 2012. It is an expected death; his wife and adult children are at his bedside. That evening, when she finally allows herself some time alone, away from the steady stream of family and condolence visitors, Lynn Andrews calls her oldest friend, who still lives in Milwaukee. It was Sally Freeman who introduced her to Bill, and if anyone deserves to know about the last sixty seconds of her thirty-year marriage, it's Sally.
"He was out of it for most of the last week--the drugs--but conscious at the end. His eyes were open, and he saw me. He smiled. I took his hand and he squeezed it a little. I bent over and kissed his cheek. When I straightened up again, he was
gone." She has been waiting for hours to say this, and with it said, she bursts into tears.
*
Her assumption that the smile was for her is natural enough, but mistaken. As he is looking up at his wife and three grown children--they seem impossibly tall, creatures of angelic good health inhabiting a world he is now departing--Bill feels the pain he has lived with for the past eighteen months leave his body. It pours out like slop from a bucket. So he smiles.
With the pain gone, there's little left. His body feels as light as a fluff of milkweed. His wife takes his hand, reaching down from her tall and healthy world. He has reserved a little bit of strength, which he now expends by squeezing her fingers. She bends down. She is going to kiss him.
Before her lips can touch his skin, a hole appears in the center of his vision. It's not a black hole but a white one. It spreads, obliterating the only world he's known since 1956, when he was born in the small Hemingford County Hospital in Nebraska. During the last year, Bill has read a great deal about the passage from life to death (on his computer, always careful to obliterate the history so as not to upset Lynn, who is constantly and unrealistically upbeat), and while most of it struck him as bullshit, the so-called white light phenomenon seemed quite plausible. For one thing, it has been reported in all cultures. For another, it has a smidgen of scientific credibility. One theory he's read suggests the white light comes as a result of the sudden cessation of blood flow to the brain. Another, more elegant, posits that the brain is performing a final global scan in an effort to find an experience comparable to dying.
Or it may just be a final firework.
Whatever the cause, Bill Andrews is now experiencing it. The white light obliterates his family and the airy room from which the mortuary assistants will soon remove his sheeted breathless body. In his researches, he became familiar with the acronym NDE, standing for near-death experience. In many of these experiences, the white light becomes a tunnel, at the end of which stand beckoning family members who have already died, or friends, or angels, or Jesus, or some other beneficent deity.
Bill expects no welcoming committee. What he expects is for the final firework to fade to the blackness of oblivion, but that doesn't happen. When the brilliance dims, he's not in heaven or hell. He's in a hallway. He supposes it could be purgatory, a hallway painted industrial green and floored in scuffed and dirty tile could very well be purgatory, but only if it went on forever. This one ends twenty feet down at a door with a sign on it reading ISAAC HARRIS MANAGER.
Bill stands where he is for a few moments, inventorying himself. He's wearing the pajamas he died in (at least he assumes he died), and he's barefoot, but there's no sign of the cancer that first tasted his body, then gobbled it down to nothing but skin and skeleton. He looks to be back at about one ninety, which was his fighting weight (slightly soft-bellied, granted) before the cancer struck. He feels his buttocks and the small of his back. The bedsores are gone. Nice. He takes a deep breath and exhales without coughing. Even nicer.
He walks a little way down the hall. On his left is a fire extinguisher with a peculiar graffito above it: Better late than never! On his right is a bulletin board. On this a number of photographs have been pinned, the old-fashioned kind with deckle edges. Above them is a hand-printed banner reading COMPANY PICNIC 1956! WHAT FUN WE HAD!
Bill examines the photographs, which show executives, secretaries, office personnel, and a gaggle of romping kids smeared with ice cream. There are guys tending a barbecue (one wearing the obligatory joke toque), guys and gals tossing horseshoes, guys and gals playing volleyball, guys and gals swimming in a lake. The guys are wearing bathing suits that look almost obscenely short and tight to his twenty-first century eye, but very few of them are carrying big guts. They have fifties' physiques, Bill thinks. The gals are wearing those old-fashioned Esther Williams tank suits, the kind that make women look as if they have not buttocks but only a smooth and cleftless swoop above the backs of their thighs. Hot dogs are being consumed. Beer is being drunk. Everybody appears to be having a whale of a good time.
In one of the pictures he sees Richie Blankmore's father handing Annmarie Winkler a toasted marshmallow. This is ridiculous, because Richie's dad was a truck driver and never went to a company picnic in his life. Annmarie was a girl he dated in college. In another photo he sees Bobby Tisdale, a college classmate back in the early seventies. Bobby, who referred to himself as Tiz the Whiz, died of a heart attack while still in his thirties. He was probably on earth in 1956, but would have been in kindergarten or the first grade, not drinking beer on the shore of Lake Whatever. In this picture the Whiz looks about twenty, which would have been his age when Bill knew him. In a third picture, Eddie Scarponi's mom is baffing a volleyball. Eddie was Bill's best friend when the family moved from Nebraska to Paramus, New Jersey, and Gina Scarponi--once glimpsed sunning herself on the patio in filmy white panties and nothing else--was one of Bill's favorite fantasies when he was still on his masturbation learner's permit.
The guy in the joke toque is Ronald Reagan.
Bill looks closely, his nose almost pressing against the black-and-white photo, and there can be no doubt. The fortieth president of the United States is flipping burgers at a company picnic.
What company, though?
And where, exactly, is Bill now?
His euphoria at being whole again and pain free is fading. What replaces it is a growing sense of dislocation and unease. Seeing these familiar people in the photographs doesn't make sense, and the fact that he doesn't know the majority of them offers marginal comfort at best. He looks behind him, and sees stairs leading up to another door. Printed on this one in large red block letters is LOCKED. That leaves only Mr. Isaac Harris's office. Bill walks down there, hesitates, and then knocks.
"It's open."
Bill walks in. Beside a cluttered desk stands a fellow in baggy, high-waisted suit pants held up by suspenders. His brown hair is plastered to his skull and parted in the middle. He wears rimless glasses. The walls are covered with invoices and corny leg-art cheesecake pix that make Bill think of the trucking company Richie Blankmore's dad worked for. He went there a few times with Richie, and the dispatch office looked like this.
According to the calendar on one wall, it is March of 1911, which makes no more sense than 1956. To Bill's right as he enters, there's a door. To his left is another. There are no windows, but a glass tube comes out of the ceiling and dangles over a Dandux laundry basket. The basket is filled with a heap of yellow sheets that look like more invoices. Or maybe they're memos. Files are piled two feet high on the chair in front of the desk.
"Bill Anderson, isn't it?" The man goes behind the desk and sits down. There is no offer to shake hands.
"Andrews."
"Right. And I'm Harris. Here you are again, Andrews."
Given all Bill's research on dying, this comment actually makes sense. And it's a relief. As long as he doesn't have to come back as a dung beetle, or something. "So it's reincarnation? Is that the deal?"
Isaac Harris sighs. "You always ask the same thing, and I always give the same answer: not really."
"I'm dead, aren't I?"
"Do you feel dead?"
"No, but I saw the white light."
"Oh yes, the famous white light. There you were and here you are. Wait a minute, just hold the phone."
Harris breezes through the papers on his desk, doesn't find what he wants, and starts opening drawers. From one of them he takes a few more folders and selects one. He opens it, flips a page or two, and nods. "Just refreshing myself a bit. Investment banker, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"Wife and three kids? Two sons, one daughter?"
"Correct."
"Apologies. I have a couple of hundred pilgrims, and it's hard to keep them straight. I keep meaning to put these folders in some sort of order, but that's really a secretarial job, and since they've never provided me with one . . ."
"Who's they?"
"No idea. All communications come via the tube." He taps it. The tube sways, then stills. "Runs on compressed air. Latest thing."
Bill picks up the folders on the client's chair and looks at the man behind the desk, eyebrows raised.
"Just put them on the floor," Harris says. "That'll do for now. One of these days I really am going to get organized. If there are days. Probably are--nights, too--but who can say for sure? No windows in here, as you will have noticed. Also no clocks."
Bill sits down. "Why call me a pilgrim, if it's not reincarnation?"
Harris leans back and laces his hands behind his neck. He looks up at the pneumatic tube, which probably was the latest thing at some time or other. Say around 1911, although Bill supposes such things might still have been around in 1956.
Harris shakes his head and chuckles, although not in an amused way. "If you only knew how wearisome you guys become. According to the file, this is our fifteenth visit."
"I've never been here in my life," Bill says. He considers this. "Except it's not my life. Is it? It's my afterlife."
"Actually, it's mine. You're the pilgrim, not me. You and the other bozos who parade in and out of here. You'll use one of the doors and go. I stay. There's no bathroom here, because I no longer have to perform toilet functions. There's no bedroom, because I no longer have to sleep. All I do is sit around and visit with you traveling bozos. You come in, you ask the same questions, and I give the same answers. That's my afterlife. Sound exciting?"
Bill, who has encountered all the theological ins and outs during his final research project, decides he had the right idea while he was still in the hall. "You're talking about purgatory."
"Oh, no doubt. The only question I have is how long I'll be staying. I'd like to tell you I'll eventually go mad if I can't move on, but I don't think I can do that any more than I can take a shit or a nap. I know my name means nothing to you, but we've discussed this before--not every time you show up, but on several occasions." He waves an arm with enough force to cause some of the invoices tacked on the wall to flutter. "This is--or was, I'm not sure which is actually correct--my earthly office."