As she popped the question, Karen ran her index finger gently across the abalone headstock inlay. The tease of her fingertip sent a shiver down his spine. It was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
Everything blurred.
Dennis and Ed reappeared in the rooftop garden of the museum where Karen had worked. It looked the way it did in summer, leafy shrubs and potted trees rising above purple, red and white perennials. The conjured garden was much larger than the real one; it stretched out as far as Dennis could see in all directions, blurring into verdant haze at the horizon.
Seurat stood at his easel in front of a modernist statue, stabbing at the canvas with his paintbrush. Figures from Karen’s family and/or the art world strolled between ironwork benches, sipping martinis. Marie Antoinette, in robe à la Polonaise and pouf, distributed petit fours from a tray while reciting her signature line.
Dennis glimpsed Wilda, seemingly recovered from her melancholia, performing a series of acrobatic dance moves on a dais.
And then he saw Karen.
She sat on a three-legged stool, sipping a Midori sour as she embarked on a passionate argument about South African modern art with an elderly critic Dennis recognized from one of her books. She looked more sophisticated than he remembered. Makeup made her face dramatic, her eyebrows shaped into thin arches, a hint of dark blush sharpening her cheekbones. A beige summer gown draped elegantly around her legs. There was a vulnerability in her eyes he hadn’t seen in ages, a tenderness beneath the blue that had vanished years ago.
Dennis felt as if it would take him an eternity to take her in, but even dead time eventually catches up.
Ed, struggling to pry Dennis’s fingers off his collar, gave an angry shout. Both Karen and the old man beside her turned to look straight at them.
Ed twisted Dennis’s fingers until one of them made a snapping sound. Shocked, Dennis dropped his grip.
“Christ!” said Ed, glaring at Dennis as he rubbed his reddened throat. “What the hell is wrong with you?” He turned away from Dennis as if washing his hands of him, tipped his hat to Karen, and then stalked off into the green.
“How are you here?” Karen sounded more distressed than angry. “They told me you couldn’t be.”
“I hitched a ride.”
“But that shouldn’t matter. They said—”
Karen quieted in the wake of the noise from the crowd that had begun to form around them. Ordinary people and celebs, strangers and friends and family and neighbors, all gossiping and shoving as they jockeyed for front row views.
The elderly art critic straightened and excused himself to the safety of the onlookers. Dennis stepped into his position.
“Maybe you let me in,” Dennis said. “Maybe you really wanted me here.”
Karen gave a strangled laugh. “I want you out and I want you in. I can’t make up my mind. That sounds like the shape of it.”
“You murdered me,” said Dennis.
“I murdered you,” said Karen.
Behind them, Dennis heard the noise of a scuffle, some New Jersey guido pitting himself against H. L. Mencken.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Karen continued. “I don’t think I did, at least.”
Dennis swallowed.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said. “Sorrier than I can tell you.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re dead.”
“No. What would be the point?”
Dennis heard the guido hit the ground as H. L. Mencken declared his victory in verse. A small round of applause ended the incident as the throng refocused on Dennis and Karen. Dennis had thought he’d want to hit her or scream at her. Some part of her must have wanted him to do that, must have known she deserved to be punished. He wondered if anyone would try to stop him if he attacked her. He got the impression no one would.
“I hate you,” Dennis told her. It was mostly true.
“Me, too,” said Karen.
“I didn’t when we were alive. Not all the time, anyway.”
“Me, too.”
They both fell silent. Straining to overhear, the crowd did, too. In the background, there were bird calls, the scent of daisies, the whoosh of traffic three stories below.
“I don’t think,” said Dennis, “that I want to be near you anymore.”
So, according to the rules of the land of the dead, he wasn’t.
Things Dennis did accomplish from his under thirty-five goals lists (various ages):
1) Eat raw squid.
2) Own a gaming console.
3) Star in an action movie.* (*After a bad day when he was twenty-four, Dennis decided to broaden the definition of “star” to include his role as an extra in Round Two.)
4) Watch Eric Clapton live.
5) Seduce a girl by writing her a love song.
6) Screw Pamela Kortman, his roommate’s ex-girlfriend.
7) Clean out the garage to make a practice space.
8) Play all night, until dawn, without noticing the time.
He was back in the gym. A single bank of fluorescent lights whined as they switched back on. Only one of the bulbs turned on, casting an eerie glow that limned Dennis’s body against the dark.
A figure crept out of the shadows. “Hey.”
Dennis turned toward the voice. He saw the outline of a girl. At first he thought it was the stewardess, Wilda. No, he thought, it’s—is it Karen? But as the figure came closer, he realized it was Melanie.
“Hey Mel,” said Dennis.
“Hey Asswipe,” said Mel, but her voice didn’t have any edge to it.
“I thought you were at Karen’s party.”
“That bitch? I wouldn’t go to her party if she was the last rotter. I’ve been waiting here so I could catch you alone.”
She crept even closer, until he could smell the sourness of her breath.
“I heard what my dad said. I wanted to say I’m sorry. He was pretty hard on you. You didn’t deserve it. I was going to come out and give him a piece of my mind, but I didn’t know how you’d feel after all that stuff I said.”
She shifted her weight nervously from foot to foot.
“You didn’t deserve that either,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Dennis said.
“No, really.”
“No, really.”
Melanie smiled. Her expression looked so young and genuine that Dennis finally felt the fist around his heart begin to relax.
He remembered the late nights when he and Melanie had been kids, when she’d turned up on his porch and begged him to go with her to steal cigarettes or throw aftershave at Billy Whitman’s window. The same mischief inflected her pose now: her quirked smile, sparkling eyes, and restless fingers.
“Do you think a man could live his whole life trying to get back to when he was eleven?” Dennis asked.
Melanie shrugged. She was twelve now, young and scrappy, pretty in pink but still the first kid on the block to throw a punch.
“Do you want to go play in the lot behind Ping’s?” she asked.
Dennis looked down at himself. He saw the red and purple striped shirt he’d worn every day when he was eleven years old except when his mom took it away for the laundry.
Tall, dry grass whipped the backs of his knees. It rustled in the breeze, a rippling golden wave.
“Yeah,” he said.
He reached for her hand. Her fingers curled into his palm.
“We don’t ever have to come back if we don’t want to,” she said. “We can go as far as we want. We can keep going forever.”
The sun hung bright overhead, wisps of white drifting past in the shapes of lions and racecars and old men’s faces. The air smelled of fresh, growing things, and a bare hint of manure. A cow lowed somewhere and a truck rumbled across the asphalt. Both sounds were equidistant, a world away.