Dead Lines, A Novel of Life... After Death

  Peter felt as if his tongue had jammed against the roof of his mouth. Everyone is hiding something. And some things are no longer hiding from anyone.

  Baslan, now at Peters elbow, obligingly offered him a bottle of Evian. He opened the sealed cap and took a sip, nodding his thanks. For her part, she continued to regard him as if he were a strange and threatening animal that had been set loose in the house.

  CHAPTER 35

  SANDAJI TOOK SCHELLING by the elbow and helped him through the kitchen to the back door and outside. Peter followed. They stopped by a large oriental stone lantern at the meeting of two perpendicular paths. A few special people, she said, have the ability to see deep into roiled waters. Sometimes it's because of what they are, sometimes it's because they have been involved in extraordinary events.

  Peter was remembering the sensation he had felt before opening the door to Phils bedroom. I do not want to know.

  Jean Baslan closed the porch door, pulling on a blue sweater, and ran down the steps to join them. The rain had stopped for the moment but the sky was still clouded over, threatening. The large backyard was ornamented by clumps of sword grass and papyrus neatly arranged in undulating, brick-walled planters. A Japanese-style teahouse rose above the grass in the back corner of the lot, angled to face the garden; the rice-paper doors were open and lanterns burned inside and along the steps. Order, beauty, calmness; none of which he could share, not now.

  These are special people, Sandaji said as she helped Schelling up the steps of the teahouse. Some are like saints. Others . . . not saints. They have extraordinary skills, and some do not realize what they can do. Edward has met them. He also happens to be one of them.

  A deck chair had been set on the tatami mat floor. Schelling sat stiffly. You still havent answered our questions, he said through a wheeze. Cushions provided seating for Sandaji; Peter remained standing, arms crossed in defense, feeling both dread and embarrassment.

  I wouldn't know what to say.

  Were not enemies, Mr. Russell, Sandaji said.

  I just don't know whats true and what isnt, Peter said.

  Schelling lifted his eyebrows and scrutinized Peters face.

  Sandaji looked distressed. Why don't you trust us, Mr. Russell?

  Because you take money from lonely people, people in pain, Peter said.

  Hospitals and doctors take money, Sandaji said. I treat a different kind of illness.

  Well, you wrap it in fake charm and piety. Maybe thats why I don't trust you.

  Schelling seemed about to stand in defense of his former wife, but Sandaji placed a restraining hand on his knee before the joint had a chance to pop. It's a living, she said, eyes dancing. I believe what I tell people. I truly do relieve their pain and give them peace. And what do you do for a living, Mr. Russell?

  I take pictures of naked ladies, Peter said. And make movies.

  Schellings jaw fell. He had remarkably straight, corn-colored teeth, all his own, it seemed. I'llbe damned, he said, and looked aside either in indignation or in embarrassment.

  I see, Sandaji said, with as much aplomband no moreas if he had said he was a lawyer. Edward, remember when I posed for your box camera?

  We are straying from the topic, Schelling said.

  How old were you, my dear?

  Sixty-two, Schelling answered, throat bobbing.

  A lovely time, Sandaji said. I was quite the young beauty. And you, my dear, again she patted Schellings knee, were very artful, like another Edward I once knewEdward Weston. Your photographs, Mr. Russell, are for young men who lack female company, Sandaji said, peering up at Peter like a schoolgirl. Do we not both peddle dreams of happiness?

  Peter could picture himself standing with arms crossed, jaw stuck out like Il Duce; a graying genie in a Hawaiian shirt and a beige coat spotted by rain. She could see right through him, and make him know it. Art for arts sake, he said.

  Sandaji laughed. Edward, still looking to one side, began to laugh next. Peter tried to keep a straight face, but the tension and the situationand Sandajis charmdrew him in.

  He had begun with Michelle; why not tell all to these two, these extraordinary antique figurines? Because they're no better than palmreaders. You can't ever go there again. It would kill you.

  And yet, here you are.

  Perhaps Mr. Russell is right not to trust us, my dear, Schelling said. What can we offer him that he needs?

  Mr. Russell needs to talk, and soon, or he will burst, Sandaji said. Perhaps we should begin, however.

  Have we not already begun? Schelling asked, perplexed.

  Not at your beginning, my dear. And how long did it take you to reveal that particular tale?

  Decades, Schelling said, mouth working.

  Jean Baslan had gone back to the house, and now returned with a tray, carrying a pot of tea in a knit cozy and four fine china cups.

  It's obvious you understand something about life, Sandaji said to Peter. Baslan noiselessly set the tray on a small sandalwood table. What do you know about death?

  THE RAIN BEGAN again as drizzle, and soon surrounded the teahouse with a rushing downpour. The roof rumbled and water cascaded from the edge of the tiles and out of the gutters, gathering in furious puddles and stooping the sword grass and papyrus. It had not rained so hard in months.

  I lost my daughter. I buried my best friend. I don't know much at all, Peter finally answered, his strong, thick fingers absorbing the cups heat.

  Nor do I, Sandaji said. But Edward does.

  Isolated from the world by thin gray walls of falling water, sipping jasmine-scented tea, Peter felt like a little boy. Despite everything, he knelt cross-legged on the pillow in front of Schelling and realized he actually liked both of these people, very muchcould possibly even trust them.

  What he did not trust and could never trust again was himself, his fallibility, his weakness in the face of absolutes.

  First, Edward, tell Mr. Russell how old you are, Sandaji suggested.

  Today is my birthday, Schelling replied with a wide smile. I am one hundred and five years old.

  Peter was suitably impressed. He could not imagine being so old. For that matter, it was hard to imagine being fifty-eight.

  Sandaji beamed at Schelling. Now tell Mr. Russell about Passchendaele. She jostled his elbow, as if to switch on a tape recorder.

  Schelling began his story.

  A man I once knew survived the Great War in France, he said. He was me, of course, in a sense. But I am no longer that trim and idealistic adolescent, so pardon me if I do not use the first-person pronoun. He witnessed horror upon unspeakable horror. He saw thousands die. For weeks, he and his fellow soldiers lay in muddy trenches just yards from the bodies of their friends, who had died hours or days earlier, mowed down in an endless series of aborted advances. As the bodies bloated and were reduced by rats, those still alive gave them comic names, made jokes, placed bets as to when one or another would burst from decay or be blown to pieces by a mortar. It was all done to numb themselves to the horror. For a time, it worked. Humans are astonishingly resilient.

  But after a week, the weather changed . . . not the rain, which was constant, but some other weather. This young man noticed the change first. Perhaps he was always a little sensitive. At first, he saw wisps moving across the fields, down the trenches, like whirls of fog. In subsequent hours, at night, he would catch the silhouette, standing in a familiar posture, of a friend long dead. Then the outline of a face hung over him as he slept, empty eyes beseeching. In fits and starts, he saw full figures of his dead comrades return, walking among the living, seeming as real as those still wearing their flesh. They struggled to appear normal, to do the things they had always used to do. Memory is tenacious, Mr. Russell. It is the glue that holds the universe together, and it binds the dead to their friends and family . . . for a time.

  Others saw them as well. Assuming perhaps that in this hellish place all the rules had changedclass and etiquette, savagery and kindness, the se
paration of the living and the deada few of the more foolhardy attempted to strike up conversations with their old comrades. At first, the revenants were unresponsive, hollow. They spoke rarely, and when they did, merely echoed, in weird rearrangements, the words spoken to them.

  Schelling stared out into the rain. His hand, hanging over the arm of the chair, trembled. It's no good, he said. It comes back too clearly.

  Ultimately, being around these heartless specters drained one of the will to live. After a long night trying to elicit a response from one of my former comradeswhose corpse I could clearly see, stuck on barbed wire a hundred feet awayand receiving only sad echoes, I broke down. I made a run over the top, alone. A few quick and observant friends grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me back into the trench. I did not thank them.

  Schelling patted Sandajis shoulder. She was weeping quietly into a handkerchief. After a few days, the revenants became little more than blurs or outlines, as if suffering through yet another cycle of decay. Perhaps most horrible of all, they now attracted shadowsworms of the spirit and dark, swooping things, like wings without bodies.

  Schelling had Peter. He felt unable to resist, or even to move.

  In the trenches, at night, after a day of fierce shelling, we heard the moaning of hundreds of wounded from the German side. And between those cries, we all heardall of us, in those trenches, perhaps on both sidesan indescribable skirling, like birds caught in long steel pipes. In the dark, under the awful brilliance of flares drifting down on parachutes, we saw shadows swarming, harrowing the revenants. There was no escape. That terribleness lasted all night, and nobody dared sleep; it was the most awful night of an unbelievably awful war. Yet it did not last forever. The living endured. And by morning, all was clear.

  That strange season did not return, not for the other young men, not for me, through the entire war. But now, it is back, stronger and stranger than ever. We are all seeing ghosts, and not just on battlefields. Am I speaking truth, Mr. Russell?

  Peter wrapped his temples and crown in his hands. His head hurt from clenching his jaw.

  Schelling took encouragement from this response. All who survived that wretched war returned broken in one way or another, their lives changed, and not for the better. I wanted to believe that what I saw was just a madness of the battlefield. Yet wherever I went thereafter, thirty and forty years later, the faces of the dead swam through my dreams. Rarely, I met them on the street, lost, seeking, watching me with empty, hungry eyes, as if I could help.

  I do not know why I was afforded this third sight, but I sometimes wonder . . . Was it because I had witnessed a process no living being should ever see? What becomes of us when we die. And how we die a second time.

  Schelling looked down at Peter, his lips pressed tightly together. Don't confuse death with sleep, Mr. Russell, he said, his stentor growing husky. Death is more like being born. It's a long, hard giving up of warmth for something you don't know. Theres a desperate glamour that surrounds the living, and for a time, the dead think they are still in the game. They cling to any memory of their lifethe sharper and stronger, the better. The dead grieve. They grieve for the living, for what they have lost, their places, their possessions, their loved ones, all that defined them in this world. Their mournful need holds them to the Earth. And so they must be shaken loose, like flakes of old skin. Here, he shuddered, not delicately, but so violently and abruptly he upset his teacup. The cup fell to the deck, but miraculously did not shatter. He bent slowly, joints creaking, to stare dolefully down at it. If youve seen such things, Schelling said, I most certainly understand your reluctance to talk about them.

  Sandaji returned the cup to his hand, and both contemplated a stone lantern just outside the teahouse. As the dusk deepened, the rain slowed, then stopped, and lights came on automatically in the yard, around the well-groomed bushes, and finally inside the lantern itself.

  Please, tell us whatever you know, Sandaji encouraged. It could be so very important.

  Peter craned his neck to look at the darkening sky, the few stars, and wondered what he was about to do, and what the consequences would be. Michelles distrust. Josephs decline.

  I saw her. I know I did. I'm not crazy, and it's not just the bad old grief coming back.

  She's real.

  Peter clenched his fists, a menacing, gorillalike gesture that made both Schelling and Sandaji flinch. It hurts too much to believe.

  What about truth? Sandaji asked.

  Peter snorted. Truth is a hunter. Truth is what kills you when you give up the lies.

  Sandaji said, An astute observation, but must it be your final answer? When you are ready she began.

  Peter interrupted. What do you think the shadows are?

  I don't know, Schelling said.

  If memories drop away like dead skin, Peter said, well, there are bugs that eat dead skin, right?

  Sandaji gave him a reproachful look.

  They could be scavengers, like rats, or eels. Or like you said, worms or vultures, Peter said quietly.

  You have witnessed, Sandaji said.

  They might also be friends in disguise, Schelling said. Sacrifice is liberation, Mr. Russell. Were talking about a process and a condition we know almost nothing about, and so if we draw conclusions, they're bound to be erroneous. And if we interfere, it is bound to be disastrous.

  It was growing dark. Peter needed to get back to the house, to protect his daughter from the shadows. Back to his insanity. But he could not convince his body to move. He remained seated. Whatever she had become, Daniella was no longer safefor him.

  I don't know how to help her.

  Crickets, assured that the rain was over, started singing in the garden.

  Lets say I believe you, Peter said, his voice rough. Lets say Ive seen these things. What caused the change? How can we help them escape, pass on, whatever they need to do?

  Sandajis expression became sad and radiant, aware of Peters breakthroughand the pain it could cause.

  This is difficult to convey, Schelling said. When we die, we shed all our memories at oncethe temporary psychic equivalent of the physical body. But embedded within that immaterial skin, as you call it, is something else, not temporary, different. It departs, but does not always do so immediately. Ive seen such only twice, in all my experiences with spiritual matters, but it left a lasting impression: a kind of golden glow, like an inner sunset.

  What is it? Peter asked.

  Some think that a ghost can still carry it's soul, trapped in memories like a bird in a thorny bush. Traumawar or other violencemay drag out the release. Or because we remember our loved ones too passionately, they cannot let go. This change that we are witnessing, this alteration in the spiritual weather, only adds to their difficultiesand to ours. If we can reverse the change . . .

  Sandaji held up the unwrapped Trans. Peter stared at it in mixed wonder and horror.

  This device is responsible, Mr. Russell, Schelling said. You carried one into this house, and at that moment, precisely, induced Sandajis visions. The visions returned when Mrs. Benoliel gave us another. With the experience of almost nine decades of dealing with the spiritual, I am convinced that these instruments of communication are highlighting the dead and their supernatural entourage, perhaps even blocking the pathways of our final liberation. Tell your friends, the ones who built these, whom you are working for, that they must stop. They may be putting us all in worse than mortal danger.

  Peter stared at the plastic ovoid. How?

  Perhaps you have been told, and simply havent made the connections.

  Forbidden channels . . . Down there is a deeper silence than we can know, a great emptiness. Huge bandwidth, perhaps infinite capacity. It can handle all our noise, all our talk, anything we have to say, throughout all eternity. So Kreisler had told him.

  But the forbidden channels were not so empty after all.

  Not news of Phil, not the fear of a real, paying jobbut getting a Trans.

  That w
as the shot from the starting pistol.

  Such intimate contact with the dead is neither good nor right, Schelling said, his face turning grim at Peters lengthening silence, his apparent obstinacy. I have advised Sandaji that it is time to leave this city, to leave the West Coast entirely. It is not healthy.

  Perhaps Joseph was seeing ghosts; Sandaji and Schelling were, too. If Peter was crazy or sick, it was contagiousbut they all had Trans units. Not just here, he said, his mouth dry. Theyve shipped Trans worldwide.

  Sandajis hand clutched his. Then it's most urgent. She looked even more vulnerable than he felt. Your daughter. When first you visited, I saw her beside you. Just a face, obviously that of a young girl, a brief hint, but there was a resemblance. You are not beautiful, if I may say so, but she was. That is the way of children.

  Tears formed in Peters eyes. He wiped them quickly with the back of his fist. Daniella . . . was all he could manage. The observations were tumbling for him now. The old woman with the silly dog, at the rest stop, he thought. She smiled at someone standing right beside me, smiled like a doting grandmother.

  It was a shock, much more than I was prepared for, Sandaji said. Before that moment, I had never seen a ghost.

  Schelling reached to grip Peters shoulder. Holding each other, they formed a small circle. Have courage, the old man said. We have seen the girl again, but not with you, and not here.

  Where? Peter asked.

  At Salammbo, Sandaji said. Her look beseeched his understanding. Both of us witnessed her. Edward and I. And we saw others, so many others. The estate is crowded with the dead. We fear for her, and for you, Mr. Russell. There is a great and old malevolence at Salammbo, and it is growing.

  Did Mr. Benoliel ever do something very, very wrong? Schelling asked. Something criminal?

  CHAPTER 36

  PETER PULLED OFF the 10 onto National Avenue and found himself wandering into the Cheviot Hills. He had been driving aimlessly for the last hour, trying to skirt evening traffic. He parked on a wide street and ratcheted up the emergency brake. Let out his breath. Peered through the windshield, speckled with drops of rain. The skies were clearing after the storm. This was a neighborhood of fine old homes, not too ostentatious but well maintained and beautifully manicured. A place of order and decorum. Peter had always loved this part of Los Angeles, an oasis of neighborhood and sanity on the edge of gray industrial sprawl.