Before and Afterlives (13 page)

“An answer about who you are?” I asked. “You still wan
t
m
e
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 mot
her’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, unfo
rtunately.”

“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 h
aven’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 fo
llow 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 wal
king, 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 i
nward
.
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 f
avorite. 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 a
ccompany her back to her home.

She was flattering. This is a necessary attractor. Neil was fla
ttered, 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 thought
s
o
n
me, as well. Sh
e
gav
e
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 situ
ation. 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, Ha
rry, 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 lot,” I tell Harry.

“Excuses, excuses,” Harry says.

We make a date to get together. Do I have any new mater
ial? 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 cre
ature 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 c
afé 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 fu
rniture polish. Outside, a wind chime chimes, barely audible.

But inside, no one is home.

She decides to kill herself. She decides she doesn’t want to live anymore. She decides she’s tired of finding her husband with other women, women who couldn’t possibly be as loyal and charming and sexy for a woman of certain age as she is. She is tired of him returning after he is through with each one. She is tired of cleaning up his messes, handling his phone calls, telling his boss he isn’t home or that he is sick. She is tired of excuses, of the constant mantra in her mind that goes, “He’s having a rough time, middle age and all, he’ll settle down again.” She is tired. This, then, decides her. She will lay down and allow herself to cease existing. She will close her eyes and imagine her body’s sy
stems shutting down one by one, the lights in a building stuttering off floor by floor. Closing time.

In the morning she finds she is not alone. She rolls over into soft warmth. Didn’t I die? She is puzzled. She opens her eyes to find another pair of eyes looking back. A pair of the same eyes in the same face with the same blonde hair, tangled and frizzy from sleep. What cracks in her lips! She raises her hand to her cheek, her cheek that is beginning to sag with age, and the other woman raises her hand to the cheek opposite. “Who are you?” they ask each other.

“I’m Angela,” they both answer.

“
I’
m
Angela,” they counter.

“No
,
I’
m
Angela,” they say. Their voices begin to harmonize.

“Is this going to be a problem?” asks Angela.

“It doesn’t have to be, I suppose,” says the other Angela.

The other Angela selects an outfit from the closet. The old Angela doesn’t mind. “Take what you want,” she says, so the other Angela does. She picks out a skirt that will flow around her legs, sheer and spring-like, and a white blouse. Nothing in here seems to match, so she will have to make do. This Angela would rather have new clothes. Wearing the old Angela’s clothes makes her feel as if she is wearing the clothes of a dead woman. She doesn’t like dead women. This is one of the first things the other Angela decides.

She goes out for the day, leaving the old Angela in bed, the house a mess behind her. “You should get up and get fresh air,” she tells Angela before she goes, but the old Angela just waves her hand and says, “Go on, you go.”

She goes, then, to the mall. She has the old Angela’s credit cards. She buys a new outfit, a skirt and blouse that match and have more color. She buys a bracelet and matching necklace. She buys perfume. She comes home later and Angela is still in bed, but Angela’s husband is sitting in the recliner. “Well who do we have here?” he says, a sly grin climbing up his face, very sexy she thinks instinctively.

They fuck on the floor, a fast fire, but within five minutes he is done and it is over. She decides sex isn’t so special. She thought it would be better. She has vague memories—memories left over from the Angela in bed—of sex being i
ncredible, spicy and full of musk and time stretching out like taffy. But that Angela is lying in bed like a sack of nothing, so what would she know?