Before and Afterlives

  Each day they pick wildflowers together, which, when they return in the late afternoons, hang tattered and limp in Dawn’s grip. Still, their mother takes them from Dawn gratefully when they’re offered. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” she says, and puts the ragged daisies and buttercups in empty Coke bottles, filling the cabin with their bittersweet scent.

  Eliot never gives his mother flowers. He leaves that pleasure for Dawn. And anyway, he knows something Dawn doesn’t: his mother doesn’t even like flowers, and Dr. Carroll doesn’t even give them to her for Valentine’s day or for their wedding anniversary. Eliot has to admit that his mother’s graciousness in the face of receiving a gift she doesn’t like is a mark of her tact and love for Dawn. He couldn’t ever be so nice. He watches his mother and Dawn find “just the right place” for the flowers and thinks, I am a bad person. He thinks this because he’s imagined himself far away, not from his present location in the mountains, but far away from his family itself. He’s imagined himself in a place of his own, with furniture and a TV set and his own books. In none of these fantasies does his mother or father appear, except for the occasional phone call. He never misses them and he wonders if this means he’s a wrong person somehow. Shouldn’t children love their parents enough to call every once in a while? Apparently in these fantasies, parents aren’t that important.

  Dawn isn’t a part of these fantasies either. Eliot doesn’t even imagine phone calls from her because, really, what would be the use? At most, Dawn might latch onto a phrase and ask him it over and over. She might say, like she once did at his twelfth birthday party, “How old is your cat?” sending all of his friends into fits of laughter.

  Eliot doesn’t have a cat.

  Eliot’s mother has begun a new essay, and during the day, she spends her time reading essays and books written by other philosophers and scientists who she thinks has something to say on the subject she’s considering. “This one,” she tells Eliot one morning, “will be a feminist revision ofWalden. I think it has great potential.”

  She’s packed her Thoreau, Eliot realizes, irritation suddenly tingling at the base of his neck. He’s beginning to suspect that, this summer, he has become the victim of a conspiracy got up by his parents, a conspiracy that will leave him the sole caretaker of Dawn. Within the frame of a few seconds he’s turned red and his skin has started to itch. He’s close to yelling at his mother. He wants to accuse her of this conspiracy, to call her out, so to speak. To scold her for being selfish. I could do that, he thinks. Scold his parents. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again. He finds nothing wrong with that; sometimes they deserve to be reprimanded. Why does everyone think that because someone gives birth to you and is older, they inherently deserve your respect? Eliot decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t respect his parents unless they respected him. Sometimes this becomes a problem.

  Before he unleashes his penned-up tensions, though, his mother stops scribbling and lifts her face from her notebook. She smiles at Eliot and says, “Why don’t you go into that village we passed on the way in and make some friends? You’ve been doing so well with your sister. You deserve a break.”

  She gives Eliot ten dollars from her purse, which he crumples into a wad in his front pocket. She’s releasing him for the day, and though he’s still fuming over the conspiracy, he runs at this window of chance. He grabs his bike and trots with it at his side for a minute, before leaping onto its sun-warmed seat. Then he peddles away, down the mountain.

  When he thinks he’s far enough away, Eliot screams at the top of his lungs, an indecipherable noise that echoes and echoes in this silent, wooded place. The scream hangs over the mountainside like a cloud of black smoke, a stain on the clear sky, following Eliot for the rest of the day. Like some homeless mutt he’s been nice to without thinking about the consequences, the scream will follow him forever now, seeking more affection, wanting to be a permanent part of his life.

  5. The Butterfly’s Question

  The girl found the butterflies by accident. They were swarming in a small green field splashed yellow and white and orange from their wings. She ran out to meet them, stretched out her fingertips to touch them, and they flitted onto her arms, dusted her face with pollen, kissed her forehead and said, “Child, where have you been?”

  The butterfly that spoke to her was large, and its wings were a burnt orange color, spider-webbed with black veins. It floated unsteadily in front of her face, cocking its head back and forth as if examining her. No silver bubbles came out of its mouth when it spoke, just like the first winged creature, just like the grasshoppers who performed their leaps, their little tricks just for her pleasure.

  “Well?” The butterfly circled her head once.

  “I don’t know,” Dawn said. “It’s hard to explain. But there are these people. They take care of me really nice.”

  “I would expect nothing less,” said the butterfly, coming to rest on the back of her wrist. It stayed there for a while, its wings moving back and forth slowly, fanning itself. Finally, it crawled up the length of the girl’s arm and came to rest on her shoulder. It whispered in her ear, “Why now? Why have they brought you too us now, so late in your life?”

  The girl didn’t know how to answer the butterfly. She simply looked down at her bare feet in the high grass and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she told the butterfly, and nearly started crying. But the butterfly brushed her cheek with its wings and said, “No, no. Don’t cry, my love. Everything in its own time. Everything in its own time. Now isn’t that right?”

  6. Centipede

  When Eliot rode into the village his first thought was: What a dump. When they passed through it a week ago, they had driven through without stopping, and he figured his father must have been speeding because he hadn’t noticed how sad this so-called village is. It has one miserable main street running through the center, a general store called Mac’s, a gas station that serves ice cream inside, and a bar called Murdock’s Place. Other than that, the rest of the town is made up of family cemeteries and ramshackle farms. The Amish have a community just a few miles out of town, and the occasional horse-drawn buggyclop-clops it way down the main street, carrying inside its bonnet girls wearing dark blue dresses and men with bushy beards and straw hats.

  Inside Mac’s general store, Eliot is playingCentipede, an incredibly archaic arcade game from the 1980s. He has to play the game with an old trackball, which is virtually extinct in the arcade world, and it only has one button to push for laser beam attacks. Ridiculous, thinks Eliot. Uncivilized. This is the end of the world, he thinks, imagining the world to be flat, like the first explorers described it, where, in the furthest outposts of undiscovered country, the natives playCentipede and sell ice cream in gas stations, traveling from home to school in horse-drawn buggies. He misses his computer in Boston, which offers far more sophisticated diversions. Games where you actually have to think, he thinks.

  The front screen door to Mac’s squeals open then bangs shut. Mac, the man behind the counter with the brown wart on his nose and the receding hairline, couldn’t have oiled the hinges for ages. Probably not since the place was first built. Eliot looks over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the tall town boy who just entered, standing at the front counter, talking to Mac. He’s pale as milk in the gloom of Mac’s dusty store, and his hair looks almost colorless. More like fiber optics than hair, Eliot thinks, clear as plastic filaments. Mac calls the boy Roy, and rings up a tin of chewing tobacco on the cash register. Another piece of pre-history, Eliot thinks. This place doesn’t even have price scanners, which have been around for how long? Like more than twenty years at least.

  Eliot turns back to his game to find he’s been killed because of his carelessness. That’s okay, though, because he still has one life left to lose and, anyway, he doesn’t have to feel like a failure because the game is so absurd that he doesn’t even care anymore. He starts playing again anyway, spinning the trackball in its orbit, but suddenly he feels someone brea
thing on the back of his neck. He stops moving the trackball. He looks over his shoulder to find Roy standing behind him.

  “Watch out!” Roy says, pointing a grease-stained finger at the video screen. Eliot turns back and saves himself by the skin of his teeth. “You almost bought it there,” says Roy in a congratulatory manner, as if Eliot has passed some sort of manhood rite in which near-death experiences are a standard. Roy sends a stream of brown spit splashing against the back corner of the arcade game, and Eliot grins without knowing why. He’s thinking this kid Roy is a real loser, trashy and yet somehow brave to spit on Mac’s property when Mac is only a few steps away. Guys like this are enigmas to Eliot. They frighten him, piss him off for how easy-going they act, fire his imagination in ways that embarrass him. He abhors them; he wants to be more like them; he wants them to want to be more like him; he wants them to tell him they want to be more like him, so he can admit to his own desire for aspects of their own personalities. Shit, he thinks. What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I think these things?

  After another minute, Eliot crashes yet another life, and the arcade game bleeps wearily, asking for another quarter for another chance. Eliot turns to Roy and asks, “You want a turn?”

  Up close, he can see Roy’s eyes are green, and his hair is brown, not colorless. In fact, Eliot decides, in the right light, Roy’s hair may even be auburn, reddish-brown, like leaves in autumn.

  Roy gives Eliot this dirty grin that makes him appear like he’s onto Eliot about something. His lips curl back from his teeth. His nostrils flare, then retract. He’s caught the scent of something. “No,” he tells Eliot, still grinning. “Why don’t we do something else instead?”

  Eliot is already nodding. He doesn’t know what he’s agreed to, but he’s willing to sign on the dotted line without reading the small print. It doesn’t matter, he’s thinking. He’s only wondering what Roy’s hair will look like outside, out of the dark of Mac’s store, out in the sunlight.

  7. Do You Understand Me?

  The mother came out of nowhere, and the girl looked frantically around the field for a place to hide, as if she’d been caught doing something bad, or was naked, like that man and woman in the garden with the snake. Sometimes, the grandma who babysitted for the mother and the father would tell the girl that story and say, “Dear, you are wiser than all of us. You did not bite that apple.” The grandma would pet the girl’s hair, as if she were a dog or a cat.

  The mother said, “Dawn! What are you doing so far away? I’ve been looking for you everywhere! You know you’re not supposed to wander.” The mother was suddenly upon the girl then, and she grabbed hold of her wrist, tight. “Come on,” said the mother. “Let’s go back to the cabin. I’ve got work to do. You can’t run off like this. Do you understand me? Dawn! Understand?”

  The mother and father were always talking about work. The girl didn’t know what work was, but she thought it was probably something like when she had to go to the special school, where the Mrs. Albert made her say, “B is for book, B. B is for bat, B. B is for butterfly, B. Buh, buh, buh.” It was a little annoying. But the girl was given a piece of candy each time she repeated the Mrs. Albert correctly. The candy made the buh, buh, buhs worth saying.

  The mother tugged on the girl’s wrist and they left the field together. The girl struggled against her mother’s grip, but could not break it. Behind her, the butterflies all waved their wings goodbye, winking in the high grass and yellow-white flowers like stars in the sky at night. The girl waved back with her free hand, and the butterflies started to fly towards her, as if she’d issued them a command. They ushered the mother and girl out of their field, flapping behind the girl like a banner.

  When they reached the cabin, the girl saw that the little old man was back again. Something was funny about him now, but it wasn’t the kind of funny that usually made her laugh. Something was different. He didn’t look so old anymore maybe, as if all the adulthood had drained out of his normally pinched-looking face. He didn’t even scold her when she ran up to him and squealed at him, pointing out the difference to him, in case he hadn’t noticed it himself. The little old man didn’t seem to be bothered by anything now, not the girl, nor the mother. His eyes looked always somewhere else, far away, like the father’s. Off in the distance. The mother asked the little old man, “How was your day?” and the little old man replied, “Great.”

  This was a shock for the girl. The little old mannever sounded so happy. He went into the cabin to take a nap. The girl was curious, so she climbed onto the porch and peered through the window that looked down on the little old man’s cot. He was lying on his back, arms crossed behind his head, staring at the ceiling. His face suddenly broke into a smile, and the girl cocked her head, wondering why he would ever do that. Then she realized: He’d found something like she had with the insects, and it made her happy for them both.

  The little old man stopped staring at the ceiling. He stared at the girl, his eyes warning signals to keep her distance, but he didn’t yell like he usually did. The girl nodded, then backed away from the window slowly. She didn’t want to ruin his happiness.

  8. Life in the Present Tense

  Eliot and Roy are sitting in the rusted-out shell of a 1969 Corvette, once painted red, now rotted away to the browns of rust. The corvette rests in the back of a scrap metal junkyard on the edge of town, which Roy’s uncle owns. His uncle closes the place down every afternoon at five o’clock sharp. Now it’s nine o’clock at night, and the only light available comes from the moon, and from the orange glow on the cherry of Roy’s cigarette.

  Eliot is holding a fifth of Jim Beam whiskey in his right hand. The bottle is half empty. He lifts it to his lips and drinks. The whiskey slides down his throat, warm and bitter, and explodes in his stomach, heating his body, flushing his skin bright red. He and Roy started drinking over an hour ago, taking shots, daring each other to take another, then another, until they were both good and drunk. It’s the first time for Eliot.

  “We need to find something to do,” Roy says, exhaling a plume of smoke. “Jeez, this’d be better if we’d at least have a radio or something.”

  “It’s all right,” Eliot says, trying to calm Roy down before he works himself up. He and Roy have been hanging out together relentlessly for the past few weeks. Here’s one thing Eliot’s discovered about Roy: He gets angry over little things fast. Things that aren’t really problems. Like not having music in the junkyard while they drink. Roy’s never satisfied with what’s available. His mind constantly seeks out what could make each moment better than it is, rather than focusing on the moment itself. Roy lives in the future imperfect, Eliot’s realized, while Eliot mainly lives in the present tense.

  “I hate this town,” Roy says, taking the bottle from Eliot. He sips some of the whiskey, then takes a fast and hard gulp. “Ahh,” he hisses. He turns to Eliot and smiles, all teeth. His smile is almost perfect, except for one of his front teeth is pushed out a little further than the other, slightly crooked. But it suits him somehow, Eliot thinks.

  “I don’t know,” Eliot shrugs. “I kind of like it here. It’s better than being up on that stupid mountain with my parents. They’re enough to drive you up a wall.”

  “Or to drink,” says Roy, lifting the bottle again, and they both laugh.

  “Yeah,” Eliot says, smiling back at Roy. He leans back to rest his head against the seat and looks up through the rusted-out roof of the Corvette, where the stars pour through, reeling and circling above them, as though some invisible force is stirring them up. “It’s not like this in Boston,” Eliot says. “Most of the time you can’t even see the stars because of the city lights.”

  “In Boston,” Roy mimics, his voice whiney and filled with a slight sneer. “All you talk about is Boston. You know, Boston isn’t everything. It’s not the only place in the world.”

  “I know,” Eliot says. “I was just trying to say exactly that. You know, how I can’t see the stars there like I can her
e?”

  “Oh,” Roy says, and looks down into his lap.

  Eliot pats him on the shoulder and tells him not to get all sad. “We’re having fun,” Eliot says. “Everything’s great.”

  Roy agrees and then Eliot goes back to staring at the stars above them. The night air feels cold on his whiskey-warmed skin, and he closes his eyes for a moment to feel the slight breeze on his face. Then he suddenly feels hands cupping his cheeks, the skin rough and grainy, and when Eliot opens his eyes, Roy’s face floats before him, serious and intent. Roy leans in and they’re lips meet briefly. Something electric uncoils through Eliot’s body, like a live wire, dangerous and intense. He feels as if all the gaps and cracks in his being are stretching out to the horizon, filling up with light.

  “Are you all right?” Roy asks, and Eliot realizes that he’s shaking.

  “Yes,” Eliot says, so softly and quietly that the word evaporates before it can be heard. He nods instead and, before they kiss again, Roy brushes his thumb over Eliot’s cheek and says, “Don’t worry. We’re friends. It’s nothing to worry about, right?”

  Eliot can’t help but begin worrying, though. He already knows some of the things that will come to pass because of this. He will contemplate suicide, he will contemplate murder, he will hate himself for more reasons than usual—not just because he doesn’t want to be away from his family, but because he has turned out to be the sort of boy who kisses other boys, and who wants a son like that? Everything seems like a dream right now, though, so sudden, and maybe it is a dream, nothing more than that. Eliot is prepared to continue sleepwalking.

  He nods to answer again, his voice no longer functioning properly. Then Roy presses close again, his breath thick with whiskey and smoke. His body above Eliot blocks out the light from the stars.