Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Like all of Jomo’s past girlfriends, Giselle was gorgeous, and she’d made every effort with her appearance that night, while Jules had made none. Sitting on opposite sides of the dinner table, they had looked like Rose Red and Snow White (and Olaf their idiot brother): Giselle with her red lips, and glossy dark hair matched to her shaped eyebrows; Jules with her alabaster skin, her white-blonde hair sticking up at the roots – she’d put no product on it – and her lips slightly dry from the late-fall weather.

  Jomo had made a joke while he was carving the turkey, and Jules had guffawed in response (it had been the thing Mariam immediately liked about Jules when they’d first met on move-in day as freshmen: such an ungainly laugh from such an exquisite being!). Giselle had seemed puzzled – she was Italian, and, though her English was good, she’d missed the context of Jomo’s joke. Seeing him laugh with Jules, she’d looked threatened, which was another common trait of Jomo’s girlfriends. They could never get their heads around his being best friends with a woman like Juliet. Over the previous summer, Giselle had done everything in her power to prevent Jomo and Jules from making the trip to Tanzania that they’d planned to do together since college. She’d failed to stop them, but Mariam presumed Jomo had paid a price for it for months afterward.

  No, she couldn’t care less about Jomo cheating on Giselle.

  But she was jealous of Jomo’s return to a carefree, careless existence. His mother had lived. He got to sleep with sweet-smelling strangers without any guilt. All was right in his world.

  She and Jomo, at first, had bonded over their parents’ cancer diagnoses. But when it became clear that Jomo’s mother would recover and Mariam’s father would not, she had felt betrayed by providence. She didn’t need any more lessons in humility or a deeper awareness of how precious time was. That was the daily stuff of her life as a mother, a wife, an educator, a daughter. All she did was care for others, count her blessings, check her privileges, give more of herself away.

  Her father should have survived. What reward was there for her dutiful behavior if not that? What was the point of being good every moment of her life if things went wrong for her when it really mattered?

  Outside, the light was changing. Mariam could just make out the Kirkland tower’s white wedding-cake tiers topped with a green dome and gold cross. The sky had turned a shade of lemon. She felt her spirits sink. It was already dawn, and she had slept for what – two hours?

  It was going to be a long day. Soon she’d have to drag herself and Rowan and the girls to the final reunion event, the farewell brunch at Quincy House.

  At least there would be waffles, the crispy ones with the Harvard crest imprinted on them. In spite of their bland flavor, these had been Mariam’s treat every Sunday morning at college. It had always felt as if she were ingesting the spirit of Harvard itself as she chewed on the crest, as if, with every bite, she became a teeny bit smarter.

  And there would be bacon. Lots of bacon.

  After last night’s shenanigans, though, perhaps it was better that she and Rowan go straight to South Station for the Acela back to New York.

  She wasn’t sure who had seen what, and by then people had probably been boozed up enough to not notice anything, but still. Some part of her relished making a dramatic final impression on their classmates and then disappearing into thin air, not to be seen for another five years. For anybody who had noticed her and Rowan’s small but passionate marital drama, it would be a let-down to see them standing in line in the dining hall the next morning, wrangling their kids, looking haggard.

  Yes, they should skip the brunch, she decided. No more chitchat with people she only half-remembered, no more asking and answering the same things over and over. She and Rowan would vanish, leaving a frisson, a question mark, hanging over their names.

  She looked down at her daughter’s face, which had gone very pale – a sign she was in a deep sleep. Eva’s black curls, identical to Mariam’s own, were matted with something sticky, probably the lollipops she’d used to bribe the girls to go to bed before the babysitter arrived (the trick had not worked).

  By force of habit, she began to compose a haiku about watching her daughter sleep:

  A tiny blue vein

  pulses at her right temple

  She paused and looked out the window again, searching for the right words for the last line.

  The man on the bench had not moved.

  In the yellow dawn, she could see his face clearly for the first time. It was Frederick Reese. There was foamy vomit all down his tuxedo shirt. His eyes were wide open – just as Eva’s had been in the grip of her night terror.

  Much later that morning, the proper emotions would swell in her, the shock that a person had died under her gaze, perhaps at the very same moment that her daughter had descended into a dreamless phase of sleep. But in that first moment of recognition Mariam felt only relief. The president’s son was dead. Somebody had finally taken a stand.

  Chapter 1: Jomo

  Thursday morning of Reunion Weekend

  (May 24, 2018)

  The turbulence was worse than any Jomo had experienced. In London, the plane had soared up into blue skies, but soon after, through his window, he’d seen the electric storm approaching, the lightning soundlessly stabbing the clouds beneath. He had never seen lightning from above the cloud layer before – down on earth, it felt as if it came from the clouds.

  When the ride got really bumpy, he took a few photos, hoping to tame the sight by snapping it for future upload to one of his three social media feeds (recently pruned down from five). Morsels of life, packaged and presented at a safe distance. If only he could post them online now, nothing bad would happen to him; his plane would not go down.

  He clung to his armrests. The rush he’d felt when called to board first – taking a left to the front of the plane instead of back to its rear where the masses huddled elbow-to-elbow – had long faded.

  He wished he hadn’t felt that rush. At least he wasn’t upstairs, as he used to be on most flights. One of his resolutions made during the bad times in recent years – now over, thank God – had been to never fly first class again, no matter how well his company was doing, because of the feeling it fostered of being at the top of the human pyramid, like a pharaoh, looking down on everybody else. It had definitely affected his ability to empathize.

  That false sense of being able to cordon yourself off from life’s hardships was what made wealth so appealing, and so disorienting. The first time he’d flown first class, for instance, he’d been surprised to find he was as jetlagged as usual upon arriving in Europe: as if spending that much money on a ticket should have insulated him from the physiological effects of jumping time zones.

  The tin can in which they were all hurtling through the sky lurched sideways, down, and sideways again. The man in the adjacent seat had pressed the button that raised the partition between their pods as soon as he sat down, which normally Jomo didn’t mind; it was the point of traveling business class to be undisturbed by anybody’s needs but your own. Yet if the plane spun to the ground in a ball of flames, it would be impossible for Jomo to see over the partition to make eye contact with another human as they approached death. He began to wish he were sitting in economy, so that he could huddle together with the other people in his row, holding hands, screaming their lungs out together.

  Jomo pushed the button to lower the partition a fraction. The man next to him was fast asleep.

  He considered trying to call Jules from the satellite phone. A single call would cost more than his airplane ticket, probably. She would be flying into Boston too, from LA. She wouldn’t answer. It would go to her voicemail, set up as an automated voice reciting the phone’s number as safety from stalkers, and also because she couldn’t be bothered recording a new message every time she had to change numbers – he wouldn’t even hear her voice one last time.

  Maybe she already had a new number, and had forgotten to tell him. It had happened before. Those a
wful few months at the start of last year when she’d been out of reach, when she’d failed to give him her new number, her new email address, and her new, snarky agent had refused to pass on any of his messages. He had tried his best to understand that she needed to take a short break from him, from their friendship. Yet he was still healing from the hurt of those lost months.

  Their trip to Tanzania the previous summer had helped him feel less bruised – as had thinking they were going to die in that tent at Ngorongoro. He smiled, remembering the murderous bushpigs. And the feel of Jules’s entire body pressed up against his in their mindless fear. They had lain so still at the center of the tent, their racing heartbeats had become synchronized.

  The plane dipped.

  To distract himself, he considered the weekend ahead. It had been Rowan’s idea that they all stay in Kirkland House, always an option for returning alumni who wanted to slum it in undergraduate housing for their reunions, pretending they were back at college. Eloise had used her influence as Faculty Dean of Kirkland to arrange for them to stay in the same suite that she, Jules, and Mariam had lived in during their senior year. There would be alumni staying on other floors of the same entryway, but nobody else on the top floor, to give Jules some measure of privacy.

  The plane dropped another foot in the air – Jomo closed his eyes – and then leveled out, as if it had got something out of its system. The air within the plane, and around it, too, seemed to settle. After a few minutes, the seatbelt light was turned off, and the flight attendants began to pamper their charges, offering to pull mattress toppings over their seats and handing out pressed pajamas. The cabin supervisor went around refilling cocktail glasses with a rueful expression on his face, as if British Airways were responsible for the bad weather. The mood lighting was switched on in the cabin, making the silver pods glow pearlescent. It felt as if they were in a spaceship on their way to the moon.

  Jomo rubbed his hands together to ease the strain of his white-knuckled grip on the armrests. On his right palm were ink smudges, left there by a palm reader the day before. His hand tingled, remembering the old man’s dry touch, his careful inspection, and his final, solemn words.

  Jomo had gone to Cecil Court, a Victorian alleyway in central London, because he’d been tipped off that an antique-books store there had a rare gem collection.

  Outside one of the buildings was a blue historical marker: Mozart had lived there around the time he composed his first symphony, while his father was ill and he and his sister were forbidden from playing the clavier (Mozart had turned to drums and trumpets instead). It was the kind of detail Jomo’s piano teacher from back home would have loved – she’d always tried to humanize the composers of times past, so that the music didn’t seem like it had dropped from the ether.

  The store was called Rawlings Books. Velvet curtains hung in the windows, and on the door was a list of the shop’s wares: Perennial Wisdom, Crystals, Mala, Oils and Incense, Tarot, Singing Bowls.

  If only it were as easy to come by perennial wisdom as to purchase a few crystals or singing bowls, whatever those were.

  Inside, the shop was lit with candle chandeliers (a fire hazard, the businessman in him noted). A few people were browsing books in the dusty stacks. At the checkout counter, a woman dressed in leopard print began to stare at Jomo intently. Typical, he thought. A tall black man approaches and all the hippy-dippy, love-everyone shit goes up in smoke.

  But for once, his own assumptions were wrong.

  ‘I’ve never seen a true magenta before,’ she said to him. ‘Your aura. It’s remarkable.’ She blinked, as if a rainbow were emanating from his head.

  The owner was overseas, he’d soon learned, and the woman didn’t have access to the vault where he stored the gems – though she’d heard that he had a genuine Mexican fire opal in there, affixed to an Aztec idol.

  Dispirited that things were not going his way, Jomo had glanced down and seen a handwritten sign on the desk: The Swami Is In.

  ‘I want to see the swami,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’ she said, leaning forward.

  ‘I want to see the swami,’ he said again.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, I can’t understand your American accent.’

  ‘I WANT TO SEE THE SWAMI,’ he said loudly, attracting looks from a couple of the book-browsers. He was wearing a suit and tie, and probably did not look anything like the type to come into this store on a weekday to ask for spiritual guidance.

  ‘He doesn’t have access to the vault either, I’m afraid.’

  Jomo said nothing.

  ‘Ohhh, right,’ she said, finally clicking. ‘Forty pounds for thirty minutes.’

  He counted out the notes.

  ‘Follow me.’ She took him up a flight of stairs, to the second level of the store.

  In the sunlight coming through a stained-glass window, at a table covered with a red tablecloth, an elderly man sat sleeping. He was wearing spectacles and had trimmed his beard too much on one cheek, so that his face looked lopsided. Jomo immediately regretted his impulse.

  ‘Swami . . .’ the woman said.

  The swami opened his eyes.

  ‘This man would like to see you. For a consultation.’ The woman then retreated – backward – as if it would bring bad luck to turn her back on the swami.

  Jomo struggled not to laugh.

  The swami caught Jomo’s eye and smiled; he was in on the joke. ‘Please, sit.’

  He asked Jomo a few questions, his date of birth, his first and last names. ‘You are 37 going on 16,’ he said, with no further explanation.

  Then for a long time he said nothing. He took one of Jomo’s hands in his own and studied his palm.

  It had been an early start that day for Jomo, a busy round of morning meetings and an auction at Christie’s where he’d successfully bid on a diamond necklace once owned by Elizabeth Taylor.

  He must already have had four cups of coffee, but in the early-afternoon slump, his caffeine buzz had worn off. He relaxed. There was incense in a brass holder, and it smelled good, like orange peel and musk. Birdsong, and wind-chime music, reached his ears from the room’s speakers. It was pleasant to have his hand inspected closely, as if the answers to his questions had been written on his palm all along.

  The swami was pointing with his pen at the crease across Jomo’s palm. ‘You are a creative,’ he said. He prodded the fleshy base of Jomo’s thumb. ‘A strong Venus aspect. You believe in true love.’ He followed a line up to Jomo’s index finger. ‘Yet you are unmarried. No children. No desire for children yet.’

  The pen slipped on the thicker skin pads at the base of Jomo’s fingers – signs of the wear and tear of life. He’d never properly appreciated his hands, except perhaps while he was playing the piano, but even then, they felt like nimble tools of his brain, not special objects with clues to his future etched on them.

  Jomo gestured to a line that forked into two near his wrist. ‘What does that represent?’ he asked. ‘Is that my lifeline?’

  ‘It doesn’t really work like that,’ the swami said kindly. ‘It would be like asking what a letter means without seeing the word.’

  ‘I’m going to die young, is that it?’

  ‘Strong, strong, ninety years or more . . .’

  He squeezed the muscle between Jomo’s thumb and forefinger. ‘You are confused by what fidelity means. That is society’s problem. It is not your problem.’

  Here we go, Jomo thought, the spell lifting. Next thing he’s going to ask me to join his crazy sex cult.

  ‘My teacher says that to learn to love is the greatest art of all,’ the swami said. ‘I don’t mean desire, not sexual desire. Learning to love is difficult, Osho says, because it requires diving into your own soul. Osho writes that without self-love, one cannot find the clarity to love another.’

  Jomo shifted in his chair. Who the fuck was Osho?

  This self-love speech was not what he’d come for. His problem was the opposite; at times he was bl
inded by his own self-regard, while pretending to have all the same doubts everyone else did.

  Take his entry for the fifteenth anniversary Red Book, the class report. It was humble, so that his classmates would continue to like him, though it had always been obvious to everyone who knew him that his lucky stars rarely stopped twinkling. Even when his mom had been really sick, he had known she would get better: of course she would. That was just how things went for him. He was proud of being well thought of by his peers, yet he also knew it was easy as pie to be gracious when you were on top.

  He had so effectively repressed his only failure to get what he wanted that he did not ever think about it in his waking life. Very rarely, he’d have a dream of a life with Jules where they were no longer just friends that was so vivid, he’d wake to discover his face was wet with tears.

  The swami seemed to sense that he’d taken a wrong turn. He spread out a battered pack of Tarot cards on the table before Jomo. ‘Pick one, but don’t look at it.’

  Jomo obeyed, and the swami laid it facedown before him. ‘Another.’

  Jomo picked six more cards, and the swami arranged them into a pattern. He turned over the first card. On it was an image of a hand coming out of the sea, reaching for lung-like creatures in the sky. Cutting Through was printed at the bottom.

  ‘This is your past,’ the swami said. ‘A sky card. Ambition.’

  He turned over the next one. It showed molten lava beneath black rock, and was captioned Fire of Sacrifice. ‘This is your present. Fire. Also ambition.’

  Jomo decided to be difficult. ‘But it says Fire of Sacrifice. How is that about ambition?’

  The swami shrugged. ‘Trust me. Fire means ambition.’

  He turned over the next card. It showed a pink lotus flower on a pond. ‘This is your future,’ he said. ‘It is about creativity, but also control. You work for yourself; you are your own boss. You most likely always will be.’

  Jomo gave no sign the swami was right. The lotus had spiky petals. Looking at the images made his head feel funny, as if they had real power over his unconscious. It was hard to look away.