Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  Here she blushed and took a seat on her bed, where she spent a moment or two picking at her coverlet and tracing some sort of pattern on the floor tile with her toe.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said, a slight blush mounting her map.

  I corrugated the brow, for the bird had baffled me.

  “What do you mean that won’t be necessary? I’ve just travelled to and from the university and secured the chump’s agreement to sort things out. Conditionally, at least. He did bung an obstacle or two in the way of our path to victory, but will, I am sure, finally come to the aid of the party. Isaac will back up your story and Peericks will have to let you out.”

  “I mean it won’t be necessary to have Professor Newton confirm my story. It doesn’t matter any more. I’ve made a decision.”

  “What decision?”

  And when she spoke, her voice trembled with a soppy sort of rumminess which at the time of writing, with the benefit of hindsight, I now realize ought to have struck me as sinister.

  “A decision . . . of the heart,” she said. Her eyes were alight with burning pash and her cheeks flushed with emotion.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’ve been thinking about everything you told me, Mr. Feynman. About the aching heart that cannot speak its love. The heart that yearns to be with me, but cannot make its intentions known so long as I remain a patient.”

  “I’m with you so far,” I said.

  “And now I’ve made a decision.”

  “Yes. You mentioned.”

  “I’ve decided to change my story. I’ll deny my true memories. I’ll do it for love. I shall tell Dr. Peericks that I imagined everything that happened in the grotto; that my dealings with Norm Stradamus didn’t end in any apocalyptic struggle. I’ll deny everything I’ve told him about the cavern; perhaps suggesting that some unnamed member of Norm’s flock brainwashed me and made me think all of those things I said before. I’ll explain all of this to the doctor and clear the path for love.”

  “You surprise me,” I said, for the old bird had. “What about all that rot about being faithful to your authentic self, speaking your own truths, remaining grounded on the path of whatdoyoucallit?”

  “I’m prepared to make that sacrifice, Mr. Feynman. I’m prepared to surrender my will to the Laws of Attraction, yielding my own personal truths — for I do these things in service to the greater truth of love.”

  She blushed again, and I can well understand why. You can’t go around saying things like that without a certain amount of shame making its presence known. “Oh, ah,” was about all I could manage as response. I mean, what can you say when confronted with a bird who’s on the verge of reciting sonnets?

  “So you see, Mr. Feynman, there’s no need to involve Isaac any further. I’ll tell Dr. Peericks what he wants to hear. I’ll convince him there’s no longer any need to keep me confined. And then our path will be made clear.”

  Here she rose, and clasped her hands in front of her bosom preparatory to unleashing her crescendo.

  “No obstacles will remain,” she said. “Everything will be in place. The Laws of Attraction will respond to the true calling of our hearts. I will marry you, Mr. Feynman.”

  “WHAT!” I said, leaping convulsively from my chair. “You . . . you’ll marry ME?”

  “I will, Mr. Feynman,” she said, still clasping her hands together over her heart as though she was gripped by the soul’s awakening. “I’ve always known I would, ever since we first met in the sacred grotto. I saw you there with the Intercessor and I knew — I knew the Universe had brought you to me through the Laws of Attraction. I would stand at your side, true partners in carrying out the Omega’s will. And when you presented yourself to me, here at the hospice, and you stammered out those pathetic, halting words, talking of aching hearts that yearned for love — why, your meaning was plain as day.”

  “It was?”

  “To me, Mr. Feynman. For you and I are twinned souls, star-crossed lovers, preordained to share one path.”

  I gaped at the bird and struggled for words. It’s doubtful that anything so goshawful has happened to you, whatever your circs, but if it had, you’d have struggled to find words, too.

  “Oh . . . quite” is all my vocal cords could manage. I mean, what is a chap supposed to say when a woman bungs her heart at his feet, convinced that she’s his twinned, preordained whateveritis, and proceeds to accept what she, in her fatheadedness, mistook to be a proposal of marriage? You can’t back out. If a member of the gentler sex thinks you’ve proposed and then proceeds to book you up, you can’t explain that she has gotten her wires crossed and that the thought of linking your lot to hers gives you indigestion. You can’t set these things straight without embarrassment on both sides. The mere thought of this hideous shame had already rendered my pores moistish and overheated my collar. I could see there was nothing to do but let the thing ride, hoping against hope that the Author would scrap this whole betrothal sequence, hauling me out of both the frying pan and the fire and saving me from the fate that is worse than taxes.

  And talking of sequences that the Author ought to scrap, I wonder if you, like me, have allowed your mind to drift back to the exchange in which Oan first got the notion that I might be keen on a trip for two down the centre aisle. Looking back on it, now, with the aid of hindsight and all that, I could see where this old freak had gone off the rails. Intending only to keep Peericks’s name out of the thing, purely out of courtesy and propriety, I’d pleaded his case without specifying an ID for the aching heart in Detroit Mercy. And in doing so I’d gone and given this soppy specimen, this pinheaded misunderstander, the idea that I’d been plighting my own troth, uttering those appalling and regrettable words on my own behalf. And now here I was, sweating at every pore, running over my earlier dialogue and fully understanding how an incorrect and dreadful construction could be put on my previous obiter dicta.

  It goes without saying that the thought of being engaged to a bird like Oan — one who talks of authentic selves, life paths, Vision Boards, and Laws of Attraction — was enough to put any man of regular habits off his feed. Yet here I was, with nothing to do but register for the china patterns and order the boutonniere.

  I mused along these lines for the space of several ticks until I realized that Oan had continued babbling. By now she’d reached the point of planning the guest list and wondering aloud whether Norm Stradamus would officiate the thing and be the one to pass the sentence. I was spared the horror of mooting these points when the door burst open, and who should blow in but Oan’s barbecued cellmate, looking somewhat less crispy and draped in a hospice robe. Her burns were still extensive, fully obscuring her ID, but one could see she was on the mend. Where she would have qualified as well-done at our last encounter, I now perceived her to fall somewhere between medium and medium-rare.

  “Heya!” she said, on catching sight of yours truly. “Look who I found in the hall.” And, like one of those conjurors you see yanking kerchiefs from surprising parts of their person, she withdrew Fenny from the recesses of her robe.

  I patted my pocket in vain, finding it short one hamster. It dawned on me that the little chap must have slipped his moorings a minute or two earlier when I’d done my bit of convulsing.

  “Grrmph,” said Fenny.

  “Fenny!” said I.

  “Mr. Feynman and I are going to be married!” said Oan.

  “Nice!” said the medium-well specimen. “But before that happens he’ll need these files.”

  And on that cue, once again displaying considerable skill at the art of prestidigitation, she reached behind her back and produced a thin cardstock folder bearing the legend Patient 2-02-1836: Arc Disorder.

  Chapter 9

  “How in Abe’s name did you get those?” I asked, agog.

  “I pinched them!” she said, now thumbing through the folder. “
Easiest thing in the world. I was in Peericks’s office for treatment, and when he stepped out for a couple of minutes I popped the lock on his filing cabinet and fished it out.”

  “But how did you know I’d need them?” I asked, even agogger than I’d been a moment earlier.

  “You told me,” she said.

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “No, I didn’t, and I can prove it. It didn’t occur to me that I’d need those files until I was hobnobbing with Isaac at Detroit University. And I haven’t seen you since. QED, as the fellow wrote. There’s no way I could have told you that I had need of those files.”

  “Weird,” said the file-conjuring roommate. “I was sure I remembered you telling me. But then my memory isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it is. I can’t really tell, but I do have a clear picture in my mind of you telling me you needed these files to help Professor Newton and find Zeus.”

  “How will the files help?” asked Oan who, up until this point in the conversation, had been oscillating the bean back and forth between me and my interlocutor, doing her best to keep abreast.

  “Ah,” I said, turning Oanward. “Ingenious plan. These files will give Professor Newton a leg up with his experiments, and may, as our singed friend suggests, help me zero in on Zeus — though I’ll be dashed if I know how our singed f. knew any of that. But even if the files hold no clues to Zeus’s whereabouts, Isaac will be so glad to lay his mitts on the files that he’ll report to Dr. Peericks and corroborate your grotto story.”

  “But we don’t need him to corroborate my story,” said Oan. “You can forget my grotto story. As I told you, I’m going to tell Dr. Peericks I was mistaken about the grotto; that it was some kind of dream or hallucination. I’ll convince him that I’m cured. He’ll release me, and then you and I will be free to marry!”

  “No,” said our singed companion, rather forcefully. “You can’t lie to Dr. Peericks. You have to speak the truth to save the world.”

  “Save the world?” said Oan and I in unison.

  “Save the world,” said the roommate. “If you lie to Dr. Peericks, we’re all doomed.”

  It seemed to me that it wasn’t so much the world in need of saving as it was Feynman, R. I mean to say, the prospect of taking the wedding glide with Oan is one which could freeze even the warmest gizzard, and if anything did imperil the world at large at least it might have had the effect of putting off the exchange of vows. I was musing along these optimistic lines when the bride-to-be piped in again, seeking notes and clarifications re: this world-saving gag.

  “But . . . but how can that be?” said Oan, and I remember thinking this was an excellent question.

  “I don’t know,” said the crispy, cryptic roommate. “It’s just something I saw. Not in my memory. Not exactly. But something . . . something like a memory. Except it hasn’t happened yet. It’s like I saw the whole thing from a distance, like I was . . . I dunno . . . separated from what I was seeing, like it was a memory sent to me from an outside source. It was like—”

  “Good gracious!” said Oan, initiating another round of hand-to-bosom-clasping. “You aren’t remembering things! You’re peering into the future! Remotely viewing things that have not yet come to pass!”

  “I am?”

  “You are! You are truly blessed. It’s the rarest of gifts! It’s called—”

  “Television!” I ejaculated, if ejaculate means what I think it does.

  “I think I remember people calling it that,” said the roommate. “Or rather I will remember people calling it that, some time in the future. It’s hard to keep track.”

  I drew an astonished lungful of air.

  “Abe’s drawers!” I said.

  And I’ll tell you why I cursed. These recent revelations about the inner workings of this charred bird’s mind had given me all the clues I needed to piece together her hitherto obscured ID.

  “You’re Vera!” I exclaimed.

  “I am?” said Vera.

  “Who’s Vera?” said Oan.

  “The lightly fried exhibit before you, Oan. Do try to keep up,” I said. “Vera’s a popsy I met some months ago, a day or two before the grotto sequence. She rather graciously helped Ian, Zeus, Nappy, Tonto, and self out of a perilous spot of bother.”

  “I did?” said Vera. And I perceived that the task before me, viz, bringing both Vera and Oan up to speed with respect to those bits of Vera’s biography that were known to yours truly, was going to take a goodish helping of exposition. I could only hope, as I dished up the details, that my memories of those past encounters with Vera weren’t among the things that had been blotted out by the Author in one of His recent rounds of revisions.

  The difficult choice facing me now is how much of the ensuing exposition I should bother recording here. One of the hitches one bumps into when telling a story like this one, viz, a story featuring characters who’ve popped up in previous episodes of one’s life, is gauging the right amount of flashbacks, reminiscences, and background thingummies to bung into the works. I mean to say, recount the entire history of every past acquaintance you encounter, and those who’ve strung along with your memoirs from the get-go are apt to get itchy. “Old stuff!” they’ll cry, chucking the volume binward or heading toward another aisle in the library or shop. But if, on the other hand, you leave out any explanation of how a recurring character fits into a web as intricate as Rhinnick Feynman’s history, new readers — and old readers whose powers of recollection have gone phut through the passage of time — will raise a baffled brow and plead for a glossary of terms, a concordance, and a full index of characters. A difficult problem, and one I’ve yet to solve. But as I’m only responsible for the first draft, leaving future revisions to the Author Himself, I suppose I should get on with the show, erring on the side of brevity, and letting the Author bung in any footnotes or explanations He desires.

  So let us return to Vera, the hitherto anonymous charred beazel standing before us. When last I met her she had, as previously indicated, been going by the name Vera Lantz. Having been blessed with television — the power to see faraway things and tell the future, this beazel spent her time peering into the future for friends and patrons, all while serving as the proprietress of an establishment called “Vera Lantz, Medium and Small Appliance Repair,” this name being something of an ambiguous pun designed, I gathered, to confound the forces of darkness.

  Now that I’d managed to put a name to Vera’s charred-but-healing face, I was able to see how she’d gotten herself into her current state. Stop me if I’ve told you this before, but my last encounter with Vera involved an imminent attack by the assassin Socrates — a gloomy chap who had a habit of leaping out of the darkness and robbing people of their minds. This Socrates, intent on inflicting a bit of no good on myself and my companions, was on the verge of cornering us in Vera’s emporium, and seemed to be on the point of carrying out his nefarious plans — if nefarious plans are the things I’m thinking of. And just when we thought it might be time to throw in the towel, Vera helped us make our getaway by whooshing us to safety via her homemade IPT — though I’d have to check back and read the Author’s recent revisions now that IPTs aren’t real. But in any event, however she managed to secure our flight to freedom, Vera — in one of history’s finest displays of all-around good-eggishness — risked her own skin by staying behind to handle Socrates all by herself. And by “handle Socrates” I mean she waited around for the blighter with a bomb, setting it off once she was sure we were safely on our way. This had the effect you might naturally have expected: it blew both Socrates and Vera sky high, as the expression is, scattering their blasted bits over several square miles of valuable downtown real estate.

  The Vera standing before me now had, I suppose, regenerated from one of the larger chunks of flesh to haul itself out of the debris, and she was still showing the signs of her ordeal. A
s for her memory, I can only assume Socrates had done his dirty work, using his mindwiping venom to muddle the poor pipsqueak’s brain. So far as I could tell, though, Socrates’ mindwiping trick had left this heroine’s psychic circuitry intact, allowing her to go on peering into the future and the past, picking up scraps of something similar to memory here and there. One could only hope that, given time, this psychic peering-about would allow this well-done, rare medium to piece her memory back together through the watching of what I believe are called “reruns.” I supposed that only time would tell.

  “My word,” said Oan, after I’d finished with the expository whatnots. “How very brave you must be!” she added, eyeing Vera with the reverence she was due.

  “Now it’s your turn to be brave,” Vera riposted. “You have to stay put. Stick to your story about the grotto. Rhinnick and I have to leave. It’s vital that I go with him. He’ll need my television to help him through the next leg of his quest to save the world. I’m sure you’ll play your own part in all of this — but for now, you can’t lie to Peericks about the grotto, and you can’t be released.”

  Here I expected a good deal of cross-examination from Oan, probing Vera’s claims and instructions. But what proceeded next from the old disaster’s mouth caught me off guard. What she said was this:

  “I understand. I will do as you ask, Vera, for I see you for what you are. You are gifted; you are a conduit for the Great Omega’s will. The Laws of Attraction have brought you to us — to Rhinnick and me. You are exactly what we need, and you’ve arrived just when we need you. I will do as you ask, and bide my time here in the hospice.”

  “A point of order,” I said, having remained fairly silent for a paragraph or two, “but there’s one thing you’ve said that I think requires a stitch of amplification.”

  “Oh?” said Vera.

  “It’s this ‘saving the world’ business. It doesn’t compute. While you’ll find no one keener than Rhinnick Feynman when it comes to any quest designed to shove Detroit out of harm’s way, or to shield it with my own body when the bludgeonings of fate are getting down to business, on this occasion you find him baffled. What does the world need saving from?”