Davy lied, too. He claimed he didn’t need to graduate, that he’d done so well on the civil service exam the State Department had offered him a job. The fib was outrageous enough to be kind of beautiful. She did have a thing for fantasists. Later, under the cherry-blossom snow, he’d flashed her the little Victorian tin with the mustache-wax ad on the top and the six long thin bullets of weed inside. She’d never seen anything like it, except in high school anti-drug films. And soon enough, she was sold on the fine art of hang gliding above the busy earth. So began her still-unfolding romance with a gift that kept on giving, a romance that, unlike the one with Davy, was sure to last a lifetime.
She cues up the trance playlist, sits in her beloved window seat, opens the sash to the frigid night, and blows puffs of smoke onto the death-trap fire escape. The phone rings, but she doesn’t pick up. It’s one of three men whose beliefs about her logistics she can no longer keep straight. The phone rings on. She has no answering machine. Who would use a device that leaves you responsible for calling someone back? She counts the rings, a kind of meditation. A dozen summons, while she blows two fat puffs of hash cloud into the frozen outdoors. The crazed persistence narrows down the caller, until she knows. It can only be her ex checking in, hoping to mark the occasion with one last loving brawl.
. . .
THE PSYCHO-SOCIO-SEXUAL AWAKENING of little Olivia: so much more education than she signed on for when she came to town. She arrived on campus three years before with a teddy bear, a hair dryer, a hot-air popper, and a high school varsity letter in volleyball. She means to leave next spring with a crater-strewn transcript, two tongue studs, a florid tattoo on her scapula, and a scrapbook of mental travels she could never have imagined.
She’s still a good girl, of sorts. The plan is simply to be a semi-bad girl for a few more months. Then she’ll straighten up, fly right, and head westerly, where all good fuck-ups always head. Once out there—wherever there is—there’ll be plenty of time to figure out how to salvage her bungled degree. She can be ingenious, when required. And she knows how to make herself more than cute, with a little application. Things are happening; the world is cracking open. She might check out Berlin, now that the future is headed that way. Vilnius. Warsaw. Someplace where the rules are being hammered out from scratch.
The music pelts her deltoids and takes her brain out for a lazy adult swim. Spiders set up a colony under her skin. When she places a palm on her thigh, the push of it keeps gliding all the way out to the idea horizon. Soon the beautiful brainstorms come, the ones that link up in front of her eyes and make the whole mess of human history so lovely and self-evident. The universe is big, and she’s allowed to fly around through the nearby galaxies for a while, zapping things for fun, if she doesn’t abuse her powers or hurt anyone. She does so love this ride.
Then the tunes start up, the inner ones. She shuts off the disc player and tries to figure out how to cross the ocean of room. When she stands, her head keeps rising, straight up, into a whole new layer of being. Her laugh propels her, helps her balance, and she sails off across the floorboards, her tits glowing like precious pearls. After a while, she gets to where she was going and holds still for a minute, trying to recall why she needed to get there. Hard to hear anything, over the magic melodies of her own devising.
She sits at her chipboard student desk and fishes out her song notebook. Real musical notation reads to her like so much secret writing, but she has devised her own system for preserving the tunes that come to her while stepping out. Line color, thickness, and location all encode a record of the gift melodies. And the next day, after her buzz wears off, she can look at these scribbles and hear the music all over again. Like copping a contact buzz, for free.
Tonight’s tune pushes her back into the chair as a band of unknown instruments play the song the angels will play for God on the night He decides to bring everybody home. It’s the best inner sound track she has ever managed, perhaps the best thing she’s done with her entire life. She starts crying and wants to call her parents. She wants to go back down into the rooming house and embrace her housemates, this time for real. The music says: You don’t know how brilliantly you shine. It says: Something is waiting for you, the clean, perfect thing you’ve wanted since childhood. Then that hallowed bliss turns ridiculous, and she laughs, a little wildly, at her own wasted soul.
But the tune and the bliss leave her tingling all over. The idea of a hot shower takes on religious urgency. Her rigged-up bathroom—carved out of the same attic as her bedroom—sports a skin of frost on the inside of its north wall. The secret is to run the hot water before disrobing. By the time she gets into the do-it-yourself shower, she’s faint from hunger and the bathroom air is a paisley swirl of fire and ice. She looks down. The floor of the stall fills with bloody lather. She screams. Then she remembers her sliced ankle. As she soaps the oozing wound, the giggles come again. Humans are so frail. How have they survived long enough to wreak all the shit they have?
The cleaning stings like hell. The gash is jagged and ugly. If it scars, she can hide it with another tattoo—some kind of ankle-chain, perhaps. She works the soap up her legs. The slickness of her skin feels like the best divorce present a girl could ask for. Each touch is electric. Her body brightens, demanding satisfaction.
Someone knocks hard. “You okay in there?”
Her voice takes a moment to catch. “Go away, please.”
“You screamed.”
“Scream over. Thank you!”
She materializes back in her room. Her body, draped in towel and steam, shines with need. Even the gelid air strokes her like a sex toy. The world offers nothing better than bringing yourself over the crest of ecstasy. She drops the towel and splays into bed. The fall into the blankets lasts forever and keeps improving. She reaches up into the shade of the floor lamp to shut it off and plunge herself into delicious darkness. But as her damp hand pats for the switch on the cheap socket, all the current in the sub-code house enters her limb and pours into her body. Her muscles close around the jolt as in some science experiment, clamping her hand around the electricity that’s killing her.
She lies there, naked, wet, convulsing, her hand snaked up in the air, trying to force the word help from the bottom of her lungs out through a mouth that the voltage locks rigid. She manages to birth up one ambiguous moan before her heart stops. Down below, her housemates hear the cry—her second of the night. The sound’s raw intimacy makes them blush.
“Olivia,” one says, smirking.
“Don’t even ask.”
The whole house dims, the moment she dies.
TRUNK
A man sits at a desk in his cell in a medium-security prison. Trees have landed him here. Trees and too much love of them. He still can’t say how wrong he was, or whether he’d choose to be so wrong again. The only text that can answer that question spreads, unreadable, under his hands.
His fingers trace the grain in the desk’s wooden top. He’s trying to see how these wild loops in the wood could ever have come from so simple a thing as rings. Some mystery in the angle of the cut, the place of the plane inside the nested cylinders. If his brain were a slightly different thing, the problem might be easy. If he himself grew differently, he might be able to see.
The grain under his fingers swings in uneven bands—thick light, thin dark. It shocks him to realize, after a lifetime of looking at wood: He’s staring at the seasons, the year’s pendulum, the burst of spring and the enfolding of fall, the beat of a two-four song recorded here, in a medium that the piece itself created. The grain wanders like ridges and ravines on a topo map. Pale rush forward, darker holding back. For a moment, the rings resolve from out of the angled cut. He can map them, project their histories into the wood’s plane. And still, he’s illiterate. Wide in the good years—sure—and narrow in the bad. But nothing more.
If he could read, if he could translate. . . . If he were only a slightly different creature, then he might learn all about how the
sun shone and the rain fell and which way the wind blew against this trunk for how hard and long. He might decode the vast projects that the soil organized, the murderous freezes, the suffering and struggle, shortfalls and surpluses, the attacks repelled, the years of luxury, the storms outlived, the sum of all the threats and chances that came from every direction, in every season this tree ever lived.
His finger moves across the prison desk, trying to learn this alien script, transcribing it like a monk in a scriptorium. He traces the grain and thinks of all the things this antique, illegible almanac could say, all the things that the remembering wood might tell him, in this place where he is held, with no change of seasons and one fixed weather.
SHE’S DEAD for a minute and ten seconds. No pulse, no breath. Then Olivia’s body, shucked from the lamp when the fuses blow, spills over the edge of the bed and hits the floor. The impact restarts her stopped heart.
Naked and comatose on the pine floorboards: that’s how Olivia’s new ex-husband finds her when he comes over in hope of a major blowout followed by make-up sex. He rushes her to the university hospital, where she revives. She’s still buzzed. Her ribs are bruised, her hand burned, and her ankle lacerated. The physician’s assistant wants a full account, which Olivia can’t give.
The feckless, distraught ex-husband leaves her in doctors’ hands. The doctors want to do some neurological assessment. They want a scan. But Olivia escapes when no one’s looking. It’s a university hospital, and everyone’s busy. She strolls out through the lobby, the picture of health. Who’s to stop her? She heads back to the boardinghouse and barricades herself in her room. Her housemates ascend to the attic to check on her, but she refuses to open the door. For two full days, she hides in the room. Each time anyone knocks, the voice inside calls out, “I’m fine!” Her housemates don’t know who to call. No sounds come from behind the door except for muffled shuffling.
Olivia sleeps and keeps still, holds her bruised ribs, and tries to remember what happened. She was dead. In those seconds while she had no pulse, large, powerful, but desperate shapes beckoned to her. They showed her something, pleading with her. But the moment she came back to life, everything vanished.
She finds her song notebook wedged behind the desk. Colored jottings re-create the tune in her head just before her electrocution. Through the tune, she retrieves much of the evening’s disaster. She sees herself parading around the renovated attic, addicted to her body. It’s like watching a zoo animal circle its cage. For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body’s most private moments, something else joins in. Someone spoke to her when she was dead. Used her head as a screen for disembodied thoughts. She passed through a triangular tunnel of strobing color and emerged into a clearing. There, the presences—the only thing to call them—removed her blinders and let her look through. Then she fell back into her prison body, and the incredible vistas blurred to nothing.
She thinks: Maybe I have brain damage. Several times an hour she must shut her eyes, while words move her speechless lips. Tell me what happened. What am I supposed to do, now? It takes a while before she realizes she’s praying.
SHE SKIPS ALL HER FINALS. Calls her parents to say she won’t be flying home for Christmas. Her father is baffled, then hurt. Ordinarily, she’d resort to outshouting the man. But nobody’s anger can hurt a girl who has already died. She tells him everything—her solo divorce party, her electrocution. Hiding is pointless now. Something’s watching—huge, living sentinels know who she is.
Her father sounds lost, the way she feels when she lies in bed at night, sure she’ll never retrieve what was shown to her while she was dead. Now, postmortem, she hears her father’s fear—dark undercurrents in the lawyer she never suspected. For the first time since she was a child, she wants to comfort him. “Daddy, I screwed up. I hit the wall. I need to rest.”
“Come home. You can rest here. You can’t be alone at the holidays.”
He sounds so frail. He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.
They talk for longer than they have in years. She tells him what dying feels like. She even tries to tell him about the presences in the clearing, the ones that showed her things, though she uses words that won’t freak him. Impulses. Energy. Twice he’s on the verge of hopping in the car and driving the 650 miles to bring her back home. She talks him down. Seventy seconds of death have invested her with strange power. Everything between them has altered, as if he’s the child now and she the guardian.
She asks for something she has never asked for before. “Put Mom on for a minute. I want to talk to her.” Even her mother’s fury is Olivia’s now to know and soothe. By the end of their conversation, both women are in tears, promising each other crazy things.
SHE’S ALONE in the boardinghouse from Christmas until New Year’s. Every intoxicant she owns goes down the toilet. Her grades arrive: two Fs, a D-minus, and a C. The letters are a distraction from that thing she’s fighting to remember. Whole days pass when she barely eats. An ice storm coats the town in a lapidary crust. It tears boughs off the oaks and maples. Olivia sits on the bed where her heart stopped, her knees to her chest and her song notebook in her lap. She stands and steps. The spot on the floor where Davy found her that night feels hot under her bare feet. She’s alive, and she doesn’t know why.
She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down. The prayer thing becomes easier. I’m still. I’m listening. What do you want from me? On New Year’s Eve, she’s asleep by ten. Two hours later, she wakens to gunfire and bolts up, screaming. Then the clock tells her: fireworks. The nineties have arrived.
Her housemates return in the new year. They treat her like she’s ill. They’re afraid of her, now that her bitchiness has vanished. She sits in the kitchen while people around her joke and get smashed and try to ignore the ghost at the table. It amazes her that she has never felt their sadness or noticed their distress. Incredibly, they still believe in safety. They live as if a shim and some duct tape might hold them together. They have become vulnerable in her eyes, and infinitely dear.
On the first day of the new semester, Olivia sits on the rim of an auditorium bowl while a brilliant lecturer calculates the premiums and payout needed for both the insurance company and the dead person to feel that they’ve won. “Insurance,” the lecturer says, “is the backbone of civilization. No risk pool—no skyscrapers, no blockbuster movies, no large-scale agriculture, no organized medicine.”
The empty seat next to her rustles. She turns. There, inches from her face, is the thing she’s been praying for. A cone of charged air gusts into her thoughts. They’ve returned, beckoning. They want her to stand and leave the auditorium. She will do whatever they ask. Down the stone steps in her winter coat, she crosses the icy main quad. She skirts the classroom buildings, the library, a freshman dorm, walking without thinking, drawn along by the presences. For a moment, she imagines her destination is the Civil War cemetery south of campus. Then it’s clear she’s heading toward the parking lot where she keeps her car.
Inside the car, she understands that she’ll be driving for a while. She stops at the boardinghouse to fetch some things. Three trips to her room suffice to salvage everything she could want. She piles the clothes on the back seat. Then she’s gone.
The car finds its way to the state highway. Soon she’s passing the sedge meadows and oak openings northwest of town. Last fall’s stubble dots the snow-covered fields. She drives for a long time, obeying the presences. Like a radio station from another city, their signal wavers between clear and static. She makes herself an instrument of their will.
Across the Maumee, the way jogs southwest. A breakfast bar in the glove compartment passes for lunch. Her change purse holds several bills and a debit card for an account con
taining just under two thousand dollars. Her mind has nothing even faintly resembling a plan. But she remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow. Once the nuns made every student memorize a Bible passage; she chose that one to irritate the teacher, who was big on personal responsibility. She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. A gust of remorse passes through her as she drives. I’m missing Statistical Inference. Fitting. To this point in life, she has missed everything. Now inference vanishes, and soon she’ll know.
Dusk and Indiana come faster than she expects. Darkness, ridiculously early, still so close to the solstice. She’s starved for real food and so tired she keeps hitting the snowdrifted rumble strip. The presences vanish for half an hour. Her confidence slips. It’s hard to pray and drive at the same time. In front of her spread the vacant cornfields of the true Midwest. She has no idea why she’s here. Then something occupies the passenger seat, and she’s good for another hundred miles.
Davy once told her that the best place to sleep rough is outside a warehouse store. She finds one easily and pulls the car into a well-lit corner of the plowed lot, under the security camera. A quick duck inside to pee and buy snacks, and she returns to the car to set up camp in the back seat. She falls asleep under three armloads of clothes, praying, waiting, listening.
IT’S INDIANA, 1990. Here, five years is a generation, fifty is archaeology, and anything older shades off into legend. And yet, places remember what people forget. The parking lot she sleeps in was once an orchard, its trees planted by a gentle, crazed Swedenborgian who wandered through these parts in rags and a tin pot cap, preaching the New Heaven and extinguishing campfires to keep from killing bugs. A crackpot saint who practiced abstinence while supplying four states with enough fermentable apple mash to keep every pioneer American from nine to ninety half crocked for decades.