It was Robbie who spoke next.
“It’s so hard,” he said. “For years and years, for the longest time, all I could think about was my own problem.” His voice was timid, and as he spoke he looked down at himself in his tie-clip, but there was obvious thought behind the words. “That took all my energy. The decision that anyone else matters—” suddenly he looked up—“it’s just so hard.”
Remorse. Remorse seems our only recovery.
“So.” Mr. Challait was folding his handkerchief. “So, ah, everything here would go on the same. But don’t, ah, don’t get me wrong. I’d allow you kids full privileges. Nights off, weekends away, whatever.”
Pretending to think it over, I looked at Erin. Though I could tell already she agreed with me. Yes, sadness may slip my attention way off the mark — I might be distracted by the briefest hint of a remembered bad time — but I can catch my Erin’s sly indicators out of the corner of one eye alone. The way she causes the shadows to change shape in that hair the color of a yellow crayon. The shifting dangle of her blouse’s fold between the peak of her shoulder and the tip of her breast. And she has wonderful hips, my wife, muscular and full of surprises. Especially after she’s set you up with those strict lines in her face.
“Frankly—” Mr. Challait began.
“No thank you,” I said, a little louder than necessary. “No. You can’t expect so much.”
Later that day Erin and I sat at the kitchen table. This was after dinner actually, and we put together our vita sheet line by line. We’d done a lot of writing at this table recently anyway. We’d answered all those letters from friends, the ones about how tough their first semester at college had been. And we may try some of that university life ourselves. I mean a job in a college town doesn’t seem too unlikely at least, since Mr. Challait promised us a “glittering” reference. So we wrote. Robbie bustled in and out, taking our photograph, humming tunes we recognized. The kitchen’s heat too had its familiar light touches, the odors of bourbon and oregano. And after listing what foreign languages she spoke, Erin told me a secret.
“What I always loved about you,” she said, “was that you never took for granted anything the teachers told you. You never took for granted anything they told you. I remember one day Old Witch Winslow told us not to put our hands up behind the radiators in class because there were spiderwebs there. The very next day you had to sit next to the radiator and find out. You were so cool about it, but I saw you. I saw you at your desk with a handful of spiderwebs.”
I realized then that, remorse or otherwise, these nine months at Mr. Challait’s had left me at that moment very calm. Erin of course was laughing, her face full of buttery wrinkles, and I understood also by now that whatever we’d learned in this job wasn’t going to be of much practical use in the next. But I sat feeling calm nonetheless. Calm like when my mother and father used to dance in the kitchen, humming uncertain tunes of their own, calm as, for example, the resume on the table between my wife and myself. In fact, reaching across it to touch Erin, I was overcome by calmness, except my heart, which was down there somewhere going insane.
Ul ‘Lyu, Ooo Ooo Ooo
We live on dead worlds. I can recall my first meeting with Ul ‘Lyu, when I began to realize what that meant. And this was only our first meeting. This was before I came to see the carnival lights inside her, before I started to needle her with my pet rhyme on her name, “you jewel-you, Ul ‘Lyu.” This was before I fell in love. Our very first meeting, and she turned my afterlife into a hell. Ul ‘Lyu asked me, at that time:
“On your world, what’s the principle for recycling souls?”
“A moral principle,” I said. “We operate on a moral principle.”
I’d had to give my answer a long moment’s thought. Here I’d just for the first time laid eyes on this creature, and she was coming after me with the hardest question I could think of. Indeed, the setting for this conversation alone still took some getting used to. Ul ‘Lyu’s eternity had rammed into mine, a terrific collision of afterlife environments. The souls in my world were knocked flat. Now that I have traveled — now that Ul ‘Lyu has compelled me to travel, past farther orbits, past the solar winds — I can picture how it must have looked, that initial accident. Ul ‘Lyu’s world must have smashed into mine like a plaster birdbath dropping from its pillar edgewise onto an old compost heap that had hardened to clay. The lip of her world had sunk a short distance into the tough ooze of mine and there got stuck.
So: one moment I was marking time, living somehow through the excruciating boredom after death, and the next I was flat on my back. Above me the smoky ceiling of my world trembled unnaturally. And then after picking myself up I’d run towards the crash. At the blurred overlap of the two worlds, the astral floor had buckled from the impact, so that finally I had to stop running and pick my way from buckle to buckle, as if hopping stones across a river. There I found her, there at the borderline, floating off the ground. She was an indistinct Other, a kind of jellied ball, floating off the ground. And at first glance, unmistakably, she was female. My heart rose like a flipped coin. Yet no sooner was I standing before her, on one of the higher buckles in the astral floor, than with the very first words out of her mouth this visitor had come after me. This visitor, this intruder, had challenged my entire life and death. My principle, she’d asked? My principle? I’d had to give my answer some thought.
“A moral principle?” she asked next, that first meeting.
“Yes.” And I frowned. It was time to demonstrate I also could come out swinging, I also could play hard. “You know?” I asked with exaggerated politeness. “You know, right and wrong?”
Ul ‘Lyu’s jelly surface quivered. For a few seconds she withdrew, floating away from me and into her own world. But she had the strength to back up her curiosity.
“A moral principle?” she repeated more firmly, coming again into full view. “Impossible. The complications, ooo. Just imagine…it’s impossible.”
I stiffened up on my astral hillock. Ooo? I wasn’t even entirely sure I’d seen this creature’s face yet. I thought: Okay. She wants to play hard, we’ll play hard.
“What’s your system?” I spread my stance, aggressive but being careful not to slip. “Or I mean, what was your system, when your world was still alive?”
For I knew from the nature of the collision that she lived, unlike myself, on a true dead world. Of course Ul ‘Lyu and I hadn’t done any talking about that difference between us, yet. Our talking came later. But I knew nonetheless, even that first time, that she knew. Ul ‘Lyu knew this difference between us; she knew her disadvantage.
Yet, unbelievably, she ignored my insult. Instead her reaction was something I wouldn’t have imagined in a thousand years alive or dead. Her surface turned to iron in certain places. While floating in mid-air, before my eyes — solid iron! The change startled me so much that I stumbled, falling back off my floor’s wrinkle. I wound up unevenly in and out of a crevice, like a man sitting sideways in a bathtub.
I thought I’d been humiliated. I thought I’d be laughed back into my world forever. But Ul ‘Lyu, oh my Ul ‘Lyu. You never noticed.
“I don’t recall,” she said finally. Her body softened to jelly once more. “I’m not sure we ever knew why we were in heaven or on earth.”