Before and Afterlives

  They’re living together, in her half of a Victorian house on Valencia. She’s very wealthy, according to Neil, and she keeps him in clothes and well-fed, amongst other luxuries. She bought him the cell phone, which now has a message that goes something like: “I’m not here, but nothing changes. Leave me a message. That helps a lot.”

  Helps who? Helps Neil feel real, although not anyone would understand that. It’s code, like mandarin poetry, like Tori Amos lyrics. It’s Neil giving his callers an emotional update. I don’t leave messages. The cell phone will list my number as having called him. That’s enough to tell him I care.

  He and Margaret are living life simply, he tells me. Their lives have become slightly hermetic. Excepting her dance recitals and his weekend pool league at the Shamrock, they spend most of their time at home. Margaret’s dancing and Neil’s pool league are the last remains of their social beings. They’ve agreed that each of them should keep hold of something outside of their relationship.

  The Shamrock, house of eighties music that it is, is Neil’s choice for keeping contact with the world. The thing about the Shamrock, though, is that more than half of its patrons are from Youngstown or Cleveland.

  “It’s a kind of halfway house for transplanted Northeastern Ohioans,” Neil jokes.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I asked when he first mentioned this.

  “Not at all,” said Neil. “After I got off my train in Monterey, I was hanging out at the wharf and I ran into this sweet couple who live in Berkeley. They were down for a weekend holiday, and it turned out they had moved from Youngstown to the Bay Area five years ago. They told me to go to the Shamrock when I rolled into San Francisco, that a lot of people from Ohio hang together there.”

  So Neil went first thing after his bus reached the city, and of course this couple hadn’t been lying. The bartender, the waitresses, everyone in the Shamrock had originally grown up in Ohio, nine out of ten from Cleveland or Youngstown. The rest were from Akron or Kent. Sandy, the bartender, helped Neil find a room to rent in a boarding house run by a Pakistani family. “I could smell curry morning, evening and night,” Neil said.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange?” I asked. “Isn’t it bizarre to find a sort of regional subculture centered in a particular bar?”

  “Not really,” Neil said. “I mean, maybe a little at first, but after a while, it just felt natural. I met Margaret at the Shamrock, too.”

  “Margaret’s from Ohio?”

  Neil laughed. I imagined him shaking his head and grinning at my stupidity.

  “Margaret,” said Neil, “cannot be categorized into any sort of region or geography. I’d say she’s a citizen of the world, but even that doesn’t describe her correctly. A citizen of the universe, is Margaret.”

  “She’s from Mars then,” I said, getting in a little gibe on the flamingo. “That would explain her talent for floating. Doesn’t Mars have more gravity? Of course she’d float on this planet.”

  “No,” Neil said. “Actually, we don’t have the capability to pronounce her world’s name.”

  For every bit of information, for every detail of his life he gives me, with which to build a model of his world away from me, another gap opens in the gulf between us. When the world was still new and undiscovered, not fully charted, the old map-makers used to close off the edges of their maps with the words “There Be Dragons”. When I think of Neil and the Shamrock, of Margaret, I imagine myself in a tiny boat rocked in a sea carved with raucous waves. I reach the edge of the ocean, where Margaret Stanbottom resides, queen dragon of the depths, her scales glittering under the water, her breath foul, her rows of teeth sharp and eager, and my tiny boat slides off the edge of the world into darkness and cold points of light.

  How to tally, to compose, to bring together answers? And what to do with them once they’ve been found?

  We used to spend our weekends lying around my apartment, listening to music, or sometimes we’d walk into the city park, which is surprisingly beautiful and ranges for miles. The oasis in the desert of post-industry. Our favorite spot was Lanterman’s Mill, where we’d stand on the back platform, leaning against the guard rail, where we could almost reach out to the waterfall and touch it as it crashed beneath our feet, where it once turned the wheel of the mill. A covered bridge spanned the air above the waterfall, and once, on a warm spring morning, we stood below and watched a couple above us being married. Their families crossed from either side of the bridge as part of the ritual of joining. Neil felt it was over-wrought. I said it was nice. A nice thing. I felt that. I still do.

  We went home from the park that day and made love only moments after returning. Neil’s T-shirt, hanging limply from the lampshade. My jeans, straddling the back of a chair. His lips moved over my body, eager, more eager than I could ever remember. I was quite taken with him like this, but also a bit suspicious. Why was he acting so determinedly passionate? Not that I minded. But my brain was saying, Something is wrong.

  Afterwards, we lay exhausted on the rumpled bed sheets, staring at the ceiling. Actually how it happened was, I stared at the ceiling. Then I looked over and saw Neil staring up as well. It was a good feeling, a kind of synchronicity. I started to wonder what else we did at the same time. I listened to our breathing. We breathed in time together. I put my ear to his chest and listened to the hum and gurgle of his inner workings. I imagined mine sounding the same.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Listening.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Definitely. You have an orchestra in there.”

  “An orchestra? Ha!” He threw his head back and launched into a fit of laughter. “It’s all music to you, isn’t it, Marco?”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “And does your passion for music rub off on those old ladies and spoiled children you tutor?”

  “I hope,” I said. I taught piano, and it brought in decent money. The only downside was having to drive out of the city into the suburbs, where everyone I tutored lived.

  “Do they listen to you, Marco?” he asked. “Do you speak to them like you do me?”

  “I don’t speak differently to different people,” I told him.

  “But you do,” he said. “You do, and you don’t have any control over it.”

  “How so?”

  He turned his face to me, but stared somewhere down towards the end of the bed. “It’s not you, or anyone’s fault, Marco,” he whispered. “People just do it. They change how you talk. They hear what they want to, hear it how they want it to sound, so much that if you spoke angrily to someone who didn’t want to be hurt by you, they’d hear you differently. Or likewise, if you spoke lovingly to someone who didn’t want to be loved by you, they’d turn your tone into something vile. It’s a defensive strategy. It must be hardwired. People will never truly understand each other.”

  “And how do you know this?” I asked. I took his theories seriously, even though I didn’t believe half of them. It was a conscious decision, to take anything he said seriously, if not literally. I thought it a respectable thing to do, and so I asked him, “Why do you think this is true?”

  “I’ve gathered data,” he said, turning his face away from me, staring back at the ceiling again. He twirled his index finger in the hair around his navel for a moment, then lifted it to rub his eye. “Firsthand experience, Marco,” he continued. “Empirical evidence abounds.”

  It was the first time I began to distrust him. Had he pulled my strings at one time or another, to see how I’d react to the crazy things he said? Played a game to confirm his theories? I stood up from the bed, slid my jeans on, and walked out of the room, scratching the back of my neck. A nervous habit.

  Neil followed me. When I went into the living room and sat in front of the television, he stood in my way. When I moved into the kitchen and sat at the dinner table with a book, he stood behind me, his chin on my shoulder, breathing hotly, reading along with me, a pet peeve of min
e. I snapped the television off with the remote, snapped the book closed, and finally shouted, “What do you want?”

  “A true answer,” he said.

  “An answer about who you are?” I asked. “You still wantme to answer that question?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then he knelt beside me and put his finger on the space between my eye and the bridge of my nose. I have a birthmark there: small, round and impossibly brown. He touched it lightly, then ran his fingertip across it in whirls. When I was a teenager, I hated it, wanted to be rid of it in the worst way imaginable. I even tried to cover it with my mother’s pancake makeup, but I’d still been able to see it even then. Finally I grew accustomed to it, learned to ignore it. Here he was, reminding me of it again.

  “I’ve always loved this birthmark,” Neil said, his fingertips lingering. He was shirtless, pantless, naked anyway you looked at him.

  “I used to hate it,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked, a tone of sympathy in his voice, as if I were pathetic, a poor soul to whom he would bring solace.

  “Because it made me look odd. Different.”

  “But that’s good,” he said. “I’d never have spoken to you at the Blue Note if I hadn’t seen this birthmark. I don’t have any, unfortunately.”

  “Liar,” I said. “Everyone has birthmarks.”

  “I don’t,” he said, and so I searched him. I ranged over his body, exploring, covering his every inch only to find that he was being truthful. Completely bare of any markings, his skin was white and unblemished. When I looked up, he was crying without making a sound.

  “Do you know what they call the places on maps that haven’t been charted yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head, blinking tears away.

  “Sleeping beauties.”

  Neil met Margaret Stanbottom while he was pool sharking one night at the Shamrock. He’d made a few dollars, eighty to be exact, and was ready to spend the rest of the evening at the bar, drinking and telling Youngstown stories to Sandy or any of the other Ohioans crowding the bar that evening. He’d bought his first beer and taken a sip when Margaret walked in wearing a purple leotard, carrying a satchel over her shoulder, looking lost. She peered around the dim bar for a moment, looked both left and right, waved smoke away from her face, then turned and walked back out the door.

  Neil didn’t know why, but he felt an irresistible urge to follow her. As if a string ran from his body and connected to hers, he followed. Good dog. When he stumbled out onto the street, he saw her blonde mane turning a corner. He dashed after her, his mouth presciently filled with her name.

  “Margaret,” he shouted behind her, but she continued walking, all the way to Valencia, where she stopped in front of her two story Victorian, the bay window in her half, and turned to face him. Neil was wheezing from the fast pace he’d had to walk to keep up with her. Margaret, however, didn’t seem phased. She looked him up, and looked him down, as if assessing his value, another piece of antique furniture, a plate of blue china from the Far East, and said, “Welcome home, Neil.”

  She held her hand out, palm up, and curled her fingers inward.Come here. Neil went to her, placed his hand in hers, and she closed her fingers over his. His hands were sweaty. Hers were cold and dry. Neil’s palms sweat when he’s nervous. His left eye twitches. Sometimes, when he can’t think of anything to say in a social situation, he’ll pretend to cough and look away.

  Neil coughed.

  “You don’t have to be nervous, darling,” she said. Can you believe it?Darling. As if he were a fifteen year old adolescent about to have sex for the first time. A regular Mrs. Robinson. “I know all about you,” she said, and began to lead him up the steps of the front porch. A wind chime hung over the entryway. The wind blew faintly. The chimes swayed without making any sound.

  Margaret opened the door to her half of the Victorian and led Neil into the foyer. She took off his leather jacket; she unbuttoned his collar; she made him a gin and tonic, his favorite. Then they sat in her living room: hardwood floors, buffed and polished; wicker furniture, creaking under their weight. The smell, Neil told me, reminded him of craft stores, a little dried-up floral potpourri mixed with furniture polish.

  “Listen, Neil,” she told him, “because I’m only going to tell you this once. You’ve been chosen. By me, of course. And what I’m about to offer is the chance of a lifetime. Of your lifetime, I mean. A human being’s lifetime, that is.”

  Margaret proceeded to tell him about her alien status. She wasn’t from Mexico, though, as Neil immediately thought. Margaret hadn’t crossed any river; she hadn’t hidden herself away in some truck full of oranges. She had crossed the galaxy, and she and her people, she told him, had chosen humans to observe. People who could tell them something about humanity.

  Neil was Margaret’s baby. He’d made quite a splash with the others. Margaret extended an invitation for Neil to accompany her back to her home.

  She was flattering. This is a necessary attractor. Neil was flattered, although this is something I’ve concluded on my own.

  What was Neil thinking? I ask him, and he says, “Marco, I was thinking, what an opportunity. What an amazing woman. She could read my mind.”

  “She can read your mind?”

  “It was how she knew my name, how I knew hers.”

  “So you can read her mind, too?”

  “No, no, no,” Neil says, frustrated. “She can project her thoughtsonme, as well. Shegave me her name, before we even spoke.”

  “Hmm.” I decide not to say anything.

  Finally, Neil says, “I know you don’t believe me, but that’s so like you, Marco.”

  “I never said I didn’t believe you.”

  “I can tell you don’t.”

  “What?” I say. “Are Margaret’s powers rubbing off on you? You can read my mind all the way from San Francisco? You could get rich that way, Neil.”

  “I called you to say goodbye,” he says.

  “Goodbye? Why?”

  “Because we’re leaving. In a few days. I won’t see you again. Ever. It won’t be possible. If they fly me back, you and everyone else I know will be dead. The paradox of faster than light travel, you know. I wanted to tell you I love you, and goodbye. And to remember that line I gave you, which actually Margaret thought up.”

  “What line?”

  “I was born on the edge of an adjective, Neil. God, don’t you ever listen? Margaret told me that the other night. That’s who I am. I think it’s who you are, too. It’s who we are.”

  “I love you too,” I say. And when I start to tell him that he’s crazy—that he should leave this crazy woman who has put this craziness into him, who tells him cryptic riddles that sound more like horoscope readings, that he should come back from San Francisco immediately, that I will pay for a bus ticket, a train ticket, a plane ticket, even a boat, whatever mode of travel he finds necessary to bring him home—he hangs up on me. A few moments of silence, then the phone disconnects.

  After I hang up I think, I should be worried. I should bite my nails, or pace the hallway. I should do something to make myself feel like I’m adequately caring, not numb to the situation. But I can’t. I make a TV dinner. I eat it watching TV. I sit in my armchair with my legs over one arm of it, and my head lolling off the other, and stare at the ceiling for a while, wondering if Neil is staring at his ceiling in San Francisco, too. I drink a bottle of Cabernet. I spill a spot of it on my carpet. But all I can manage in the way of worry for Neil is that I’ll soon see him on CNN making a fool of himself, connected with a cult happening. I hope they aren’t the sort of cult that take their own lives. I can deal with Neil making a fool of himself, but not with him being dead.

  The phone rings the next morning, and when I answer, Harry, the pianist for Winterlong, tells me, “Well, hello, stranger. Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

  “Sorry,” I say, and launch into reasons for my own self-imposed exile. “I’ve been sick a little. I’ve been working a lo
t,” I tell Harry.

  “Excuses, excuses,” Harry says.

  We make a date to get together. Do I have any new material? No, I don’t. I haven’t been writing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Harry tells me. “Just let’s get together. It’s been too long.”

  “Any word on Neil?” he asks before we hang up.

  “No,” I say. “None.” And afterwards I’m thinking, there never was.

  I sit and wait in the kitchen, staring at the phone. I lie on my bed with my head turned towards the nightstand, and stare at the phone. I stop on sidewalks, near phone booths, and wait for them to ring, but they never do. Or when they do ring, it’s the wrong number, or it’s Harry, or whoever. It isn’t Neil.

  I worry after a few days pass without hearing from him, so I pick up the phone and dial Neil’s cell phone. A pre-recorded message tells me the number is no longer in service. So I dial Margaret’s number, as Neil had called me collect from her house a few times and it’s on my phone bill. But again, a recorded message.

  “This number has been disconnected.”

  Another motto for Youngstown: If you can be happy here, you can be happy anywhere.

  How to tally, to compose, to bring together answers? And what to do with them once they’ve been found? I could throw Neil into the air and disperse him, no more than stardust or pollen, a creature of light and lightness, not something with weight or gravity, to keep him down, to keep him here, with me. I could try to name him, define him, but for all my little words, something of him would still escape me.

  “Let me lead you through the hall of mirrors,” I whisper in a café downtown, even though there’s no one near enough to hear me. I drink my coffee and begin to hum a new tune.

  I imagine Margaret’s Victorian, light pouring through the bay window at this moment. It’s a beautiful morning in San Francisco. Her house is quiet. It smells like potpourri and furniture polish. Outside, a wind chime chimes, barely audible.