I sure didn’t see that one coming, she thought.
‘That’s right, blame me,’ she said. Her voice was foggy, hooting. ‘Blame me and then cry your stupid little eyes out.’
He cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard her – or couldn’t believe what he’d heard – then made a fist and drew it back.
She raised her face, her now crooked nose leading the way. There was a beard of blood on her chin. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s the only thing you’re halfway good at.’
‘How many men have you slept with since that day? Tell me!’
‘Slept with none. Fucked a dozen.’ A lie, actually. There had only been the cop and an electrician who’d come one day while Chad was in town. ‘Lay on, McDuff.’
Instead of laying on, he opened his fist and let his hand drop to his side. ‘The book would have been fine if not for you.’ He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘That’s not exactly right, but you know what I mean.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘I’m going to leave you and write another one. A better one.’
‘Pigs will whistle.’
‘You wait,’ he said, as tearfully childish as a little boy who has just lost in a schoolyard scuffle. ‘You just wait and see.’
‘You’re drunk. Go to bed.’
‘You poison bitch.’
Having delivered himself of this, he shuffled off to bed, walking with his head down. He even walked like Winnie after his stroke.
Nora thought about going to Urgent Care for her nose, but was too tired to think of a story that would have just the right touch of veracity. In her heart – her nursely heart – she knew there was no such story. They would see through her no matter how good her story was. When it came to things like this, ER personnel always did.
She stuffed cotton up her nose and took two Tylenol with codeine. Then she went outside and weeded her garden until it was too dark to see. When she went inside, Chad was snoring on the bed. He had taken his shirt off, but his pants were still on. She thought he looked like a fool. This made her feel like crying, but she didn’t.
He left her and went back to New York. Sometimes he emailed, and sometimes she emailed back. He didn’t ask for his half of the remaining money, which was good. She wouldn’t have given it to him. She had worked for that money and was still working with it, feeding it into the bank little by little, paying off the house. He said in his emails that he was subbing again and writing on the weekends. She believed him about the subbing but not about the writing. His emails had a strengthless, washed-out feeling that suggested he might not have much left when it came to writing. She’d always thought he was pretty much a one-book man, anyway.
She took care of the divorce herself. She found everything she needed on the Internet. There were papers she needed him to sign, and he signed them. They came back with no note attached.
The following summer – a good one; she was working full-time at the local hospital and her garden was an absolute riot – she was browsing in a used bookstore one day and came across a volume she had seen in Winnie’s study: The Basis of Morality. It was a pretty beat-up copy, and she was able to take it home for two dollars, plus tax.
It took her the rest of the summer and most of the fall to read it cover-to-cover. In the end she was disappointed. There was little or nothing in it she did not already know.
For Jim Sprouse
I think that most people tend to meditate more on What Comes Next as they get older, and since I’m now in my late sixties, I qualify in that regard. Several of my short stories and at least one novel (Revival) have approached this question. I can’t say ‘have dealt with it,’ because that implies some conclusion, and none of us can really draw one, can we? Nobody has sent back any cell phone video from the land of death. There’s faith, of course (and a veritable deluge of ‘heaven is real’ books), but faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof.
When you boil it down, there are only two choices. Either there’s Something, or there’s Nothing. If it’s the latter, case closed. If it’s the former, there are myriad possibilities, with heaven, hell, purgatory, and reincarnation being the most popular on the Afterlife Hit Parade. Or maybe you get what you always believed you would get. Maybe the brain is equipped with a deeply embedded exit program that starts running just as everything else is running down, and we’re getting ready to catch that final train. To me, the reports of near-death experiences tend to support this idea.
What I’d like – I think – is a chance to go through it all again, as a kind of immersive movie, so I could relish the good times and good calls, like marrying my wife and our decision to have that third child. Of course I’d also have to rue the bad calls (I’ve made my share), but who wouldn’t like to reexperience that first good kiss, or have a chance to relax and really enjoy the wedding ceremony that went by in such a nervous blur?
This story isn’t about such a rerun – not exactly – but musing about the possibility led me to write about one man’s afterlife. The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot.
Afterlife
William Andrews, an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, dies on the afternoon of September 23, 2012. It is an expected death; his wife and adult children are at his bedside. That evening, when she finally allows herself some time alone, away from the steady stream of family and condolence visitors, Lynn Andrews calls her oldest friend, who still lives in Milwaukee. It was Sally Freeman who introduced her to Bill, and if anyone deserves to know about the last sixty seconds of her thirty-year marriage, it’s Sally.
‘He was out of it for most of the last week – the drugs – but conscious at the end. His eyes were open, and he saw me. He smiled. I took his hand and he squeezed it a little. I bent over and kissed his cheek. When I straightened up again, he was gone.’ She has been waiting for hours to say this, and with it said, she bursts into tears.
Her assumption that the smile was for her is natural enough, but mistaken. As he is looking up at his wife and three grown children – they seem impossibly tall, creatures of angelic good health inhabiting a world he is now departing – Bill feels the pain he has lived with for the past eighteen months leave his body. It pours out like slop from a bucket. So he smiles.
With the pain gone, there’s little left. His body feels as light as a fluff of milkweed. His wife takes his hand, reaching down from her tall and healthy world. He has reserved a little bit of strength, which he now expends by squeezing her fingers. She bends down. She is going to kiss him.
Before her lips can touch his skin, a hole appears in the center of his vision. It’s not a black hole but a white one. It spreads, obliterating the only world he’s known since 1956, when he was born in the small Hemingford County Hospital in Nebraska. During the last year, Bill has read a great deal about the passage from life to death (on his computer, always careful to obliterate the history so as not to upset Lynn, who is constantly and unrealistically upbeat), and while most of it struck him as bullshit, the so-called ‘white light’ phenomenon seemed quite plausible. For one thing, it has been reported in all cultures. For another, it has a smidgen of scientific credibility. One theory he’s read suggests the white light comes as a result of the sudden cessation of blood flow to the brain. Another, more elegant, posits that the brain is performing a final global scan in an effort to find an experience comparable to dying.