Before and Afterlives (16 page)

It was afterwards, after his suicide to stop the pain he and my family were going through, then after my own, that I fo
rgot everything he told me.

Jan swings the door open and a blast of heat hits me. The inside is lit by hundreds of candles. Bleachers line the walls. And in the center of everything, something stands shrouded in a red ve
lvet curtain. The curtain sways a little, as if something large is breathing behind it. As we enter, the audience cheers.

They are spectacularly beautiful tonight, wearing tuxedoes and gowns and jewels. A small, nut-brown woman with a red dot on her forehead brushes her hand against me as I pass her. A touch, just a touch, to feel my power. Maybe it will rub off, they think. And if it doesn’t, let him die, he deserves it, kee
ping a talent like that to himself. Who does he think he is?

A good question. But already Jan’s voice is filling the warehouse, interrupting my answer. She uses a microphone to intr
oduce me. “Everyone, put your hands together to welcome my very own little brother, the one and only Resurrection Artist!” she shouts. “The only one known to be alive at this time,” she adds a second later, then laughs at her attempt at humor. Some of the audience chuckles. They’ll laugh to grease her, anything to get this show moving.

Two heavily-muscled men wearing tuxedoes stand on either side of the red velvet curtain, holding a braided gold rope in their hands. Jan turns to them and shouts, “Here is the med
ium of death!” and the men pull the rope until the shroud lifts to reveal a large kiln with a fire roaring inside it. One of the men swings the gate open, a gate large enough for a man to step inside. The fire lifts and enlarges.

Jan motions for me to approach, and I do. Each step is like walking through water though, that slow trudge, but finally I stand before it and think, Is this what I want? What about my body? If it burns, will I still come back? Do I need a body to r
eturn to? There’s so much we don’t know. I’ve always had one before, even if it was bloody and battered.

The audience rises to its feet. When they stand to cheer I feel as though I should be in the Coliseum, preparing to battle a lion. Or in the corner of a boxing ring, an announcer calling out the names and win-loss ratios of each opponent. I’m in one corner, but who is in the other?

I look into the kiln, that gold and red waiting for my body, and see Jan at first. Then it isn’t Jan, but my mother standing in the fire. Then my dead father, his eyes sunken and hollow, his flesh white and mushroom rotten. Then I see the reflection of the audience cheering behind me. Then I don’t see any of them, but myself. I walk out of the kiln, licks of flame rolling off my skin like drops of water
.
Ding, ding, ding
.
We stare and stare at each other, then move toward the center, fists ready.

I turn to find Jan running back and forth in front of the bleac
hers, waving her hands, stirring the crowd into a frenzy. She’s good at that sort of thing. I wait until she turns to give me a brief moment of attention and shout, “Call it off.”

Jan’s eyes narrow. She taps a finger on her ear
:
What did you say?

I repeat myself slowly so she can read my lips, and when she begins to understand, a shadow spreads over her face. She marches over, puts an arm around my shoulder and says, “Aiden, what the hell are you doing? These people have a
lready paid.”

“Send them away,” I say. “Tell them I’m not dying. Wha
tever it takes, you can handle it.”

“You little—I ought to kill you myself.” Jan removes her arm and points a finger in my face. “How could you? How else are you going to live?”

To live. Isn’t that the question? How to live? I’ve never answered it. I only know how to die. How to wait until the next death.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “But I want to find out.”

Jan folds her arms across her chest and shakes her head, astonished. I don’t flinch, although I want to. I walk away and step out into the night. The audience titters and whispers. “What is going on here?!” a woman shouts.

I shut the door behind me and walk to the back of the buil
ding, sit down among shattered beer bottles. My legs stretch out in front of me and I stare at them, thinking, Those are my legs. I find them more interesting than I should probably.

Within an hour, the crowd disperses. The car engines turn over, the tires peel, the annoyed voices grow fewer. Finally, Jan finds me around back.

“Are you proud of yourself?” she asks. I nod. “Well I hope you’re happy. I am no longer your sister. And don’t think Mother won’t hear about this. What would Dad say?”

She walks away, but I’m not concerned any longer. Jan will fo
rgive me if it’s possible. And if it isn’t possible, I’ll learn to live without her.

Suddenly I see a figure lurching toward me from the next lot over. After a moment the figure becomes a man, and then he stops, his tennis shoes scraping the asphalt next to me.

“You see the resurrection?” he asks, scratching his face.

“There wasn’t one,” I tell him. “It didn’t go off.”

“That’s too bad. I wanted to see it. Something like that, the power to come back to life—I wonder what it’s like. But that chick I phoned for tickets was asking way too much.”

He’s grunged out, the knees of his jeans ripped, a bruise on one cheek, a cut on his forehead. “Why would you want to see that?” I ask. “It isn’t the most pleasant thing, dying.”

“It’s the comeback,” he says. “That’s what’s appealing.” He coughs and lights a cigarette. The end glows red then orange in the dark.

The comeback, I think. Yes, that’s it. Life, life. The beat of a heart, the break of a wave on the beach. What a plunge. What a lark to live for even one day.

“It isn’t too late,” I say. His face screws up, his nose wrinkling in confusion. I lead him to the warehouse where the candles have all been put out, the bleachers emptied of human breathing. The kiln still glows. “Here is your resurrection,” I tell him, not your death. I move toward the kiln, fidgeting, wondering what kind of fate the flames hold for me. I imagine myself a skeleton that turns to ash, then to dust. A wind comes along and blows me across the cosmos. I open the gate and the fire breathes heavy, a welcoming kiss.

I tell myself when I return this time I will be a bird of fire, hol
ding a rose in my burning talons. I will stand before him then, this audience of one, whose face glows from my flames, whose skin flushes from my heat. And maybe, just maybe he’ll say it was terrible to see me burning like that, but also how it was a beautiful thing. Not a rush, but a moment of grace. I will bow to him then, and begin again. This time for keeps. I will lay the rose at his feet.

There was once a boy who was born wrapped in barbed wire. The defect was noticed immediately after his birth, when the doctor had to snip the boy’s umbilical cord with wire cutters. But elsewhere, too, the wire curled out of the boy’s flesh, circling his arms and legs, his tiny torso. They didn’t cause him pain, these metal spikes that grew out of the round hills of his body, although due to the dangerous nature of his birth, his mother had lost a great amount of blood during labor. After delivery, the nurse laid the boy in his mother’s arms, careful to show her the safe places to hold him. And before her last breath left her, she managed to tell her son these words: “Bumblebees fly anyway, my love.”

They followed him, those words, for the rest of his life, skimming the rim of his ear, buzzing loud as the bees farmed by his father the beekeeper. He did not remember his mother saying those words, but he often imagined the scene as his father d
escribed it. “Your mother loved you very much,” he told the boy, blinking, pursing his lips. The beekeeper wanted to pat his son’s head, but was unable to touch him just there—on his crown—where a cowlick of barbs jutted out of the boy’s brown curls.

The beekeeper and his son lived in a cabin in the middle of the woods. They only came out to go into town for supplies and groceries. The beekeeper took the boy with him whene
ver he trekked through the woods to his hives. He showed the boy how to collect honey, how to not disturb the bees, how to avoid an unnecessary stinging. Sometimes the beekeeper wore a baggy white suit with a helmet and visor, which the bees clung to, crawling over the surface of his body. The boy envied the bees that landscape. He imagined himself a bee in those moments. As a bee, his sting would never slip through his father’s suit to strike the soft flesh hidden beneath it. His barbs, though, would find their way through nearly any barrier.

One day the beekeeper gave the boy a small honeycomb and told him to eat it. The comb dripped a sticky gold, and the boy wrinkled his nose. “It looks like wax,” he told his f
ather. But the beekeeper only said, “Eat,” so the boy did.

The honeycomb filled his mouth with a sweetness that tas
ted of sunlight on water. Never before had something so beautiful sat on the tip of his tongue. Swallowing, he closed his eyes and thought of his mother. The way she held him in her arms before dying, the way she spoke before going away forever. The memory of his mother tasted like honey too, and he asked the beekeeper, “What did she mean? Bumblebees fly anyway?”

“Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly,” said the beekeeper, clo
sing the lid on a hive. Honeybees crawled on the inside of the lid like a living carpet. “Their bodies are so large and their wings so small, they shouldn’t be able to lift themselves into the air, but somehow they do. They fly.”

When the boy turned five, the beekeeper sent him to school with the town’s other children. At first the boy was excited, standing on the shoulder of the highway where the trail that led back through the woods to the beekeeper’s cabin ended. But soon the bus came and, as he stepped inside, he realized none of the other kids had been born wrapped in barbed wire. They were regular flesh children with soft hair any adult could run their fingers through. They looked at him, eyes wide, and said nothing. No one offered him a seat, so the boy sat behind the bus driver.

They all knew of the barbed wire boy, of course, from tales that had circulated since the day of his birth. But only a few had act
ually seen him. The one story the children lived on was told by a girl who had seen him in the fruit section of the grocery store late one night, shopping with his father. He had reached for a bunch of grapes, she said, but the grapes got tangled in the wire around his hand. His father bent down to remove them, carefully pulling the vines away, but several grapes remained stuck on his barbs, their juice sliding down the metal. “The manager made them buy that bunch,” the girl said with an air of righteousness. After all, those grapes were ruined.

On his first day of class, no one talked to him except the teac
her, Ms. Morrison, who told him where he could sit. She pointed to a desk in the back of the room, far away from the rows of desks that held the other children. When he looked up at her, she could already see the question forming on the cage of his face and said, “For their safety, dear. And for yours.”

Ms. Morrison taught the boy how to read, how to write, and how to add numbers. He already knew how to subtract. His f
ather had taught him that. So he was ahead of the class, or behind them, depending on your view of subtraction.

This is how the barbed wire boy learned to subtract:

“How old am I?” he once asked the beekeeper.

“It’s been four years since your mother died,” the beekeeper r
eplied.

“Four,” said the barbed wire boy. “How much is four, F
ather?”

“Four is one less than five,” said the beekeeper. “Three is one less than four. And two is what your mother and I once were t
ogether.”

It was only once Ms. Morrison took an apple and orange and put them together that the boy realized things could grow in number.

The barbed wire boy kept to himself, but his solitude was not of his own choosing. The town parents had warned their children. “You could get hurt playing with that boy,” they said. “You could get tangled up in his barbed wire and then what would you do?”

The barbed wire boy understood their reluctance to engage him, but it would be lying to say he did not long for a friend. For someone to at least confide in. Day after day he sat on the teeter-totter during recess, waiting for someone to climb onto the side opposite, someone whose weight would lift him high into the air.

It was not until years later, after the boy’s limbs grew long and ropey, after he nearly reached the same height as the be
ekeeper, after his body began to fill up the coils of barbs around his body—the wire sinking into the meat of his flesh—it was not until after he’d given up on the prospect of communion that something just like that began to happen.

What happened was, a minister came to town holding a B
ible in one hand and his daughter’s hand in the other. This minister had plans and was telling everyone about them. He was going to re-open the abandoned church that stood in the center of town where the two main streets intersected.