The Afterlife of Billy Fingers: How My Bad-Boy Brother Proved to Me There's Life After Death

by Annie Kagan

  Each human being carries out Divine experiments in the conditions that earth has to offer. The holy grail of the mythological journey of human incarnation is the wisdom formulas.

  Not only do I understand the meaning of my tribe's formulas, but also through them I feel the essence of the souls who created them. What's surprising is how unconventional these Lohana formulas are. They contain no fixed idea of what is virtuous. These equations go far beyond human labels of “good” and “bad” and focus instead on the quality of one's light.

  They also speak to a great mystery. Why would a soul forget its high origins, clothe itself in a body, and leave the Higher Worlds for the more difficult earth?

  Well, my darling, because the soul loves experience and doesn't fear suffering. The soul knows it can never be injured. This doesn't mean it isn't natural for people to prefer pleasure over pain. That's part of the plan. And until you've left your world, you'll never fully understand all the whys and wherefores.

  I was never fond of pain and suffering, but my endof-life-on-earth scenario was filled with it. You might think because I suffered so much that I failed, but that wouldn't be true. Even though my life ended like a tragic opera, that was okay, honey.

  I know, Princess. You're wishing I could share the Lohana formulas with you, but I don't have permission to do that. Don't worry, Annie. A lot of their wisdom is already in this book. Besides, you have your own equations that are being written as you live. And don't worry about them, either. You don't need to figure them out. Just follow your chimera, your eternal fire, and the formulas will come of themselves.

  Once I could feel the earth beneath my feet again, I Googled “Lohana.” I was startled to discover that Lohana was the name of an ancient tribe that originated in India. According to legend, these noble warriors were descendants of Lord Rama, a king who lived more than five thousand years ago and is still worshiped by Hindus as one of the many incarnations of God. Was Billy a descendent of Rama?

  I re-read Billy's notes, looking for an answer. It wasn't there, but something Billy said grabbed my attention.

  Just follow your chimera, your eternal fire, and the formulas will come of themselves.

  What was a chimera?

  The first search result that came up was a threeheaded, fire-breathing she-monster from Greek mythology.

  I kept looking.

  Soon, an article called At the Feet of the Eternal Fire came up. It was about the fires known as the Chimera, which burn on Mount Olympus in Turkey. These mysterious flames come from inside the mountain and blaze skyward through holes in the rock. The Chimera are considered eternal—when attempts are made to extinguish them, they re-ignite.

  What was my chimera? Where had my fire gone? Writing music had always been my passion, but that wasn't going anywhere. I had to admit to my Greta Garbo self that the Billy experience had lit a spark within me. Maybe being a cosmic detective exploring the world beyond was my new chimera.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Patty Malone

  On an idyllic September evening, while I was taking a shower, Billy said in a wickedly scary voice, “Steve is going to be very sick.” Then he laughed like Vincent Price in a horror movie.

  I was confused and upset. Billy had never made this kind of prediction before, and why was he using that spooky voice? Maybe this wasn't really Billy. It didn't sound like him. Maybe it was some kind of imposter trying to scare me. But why?

  It was true that Steve hadn't been feeling well lately, but a specialist had assured him it was just some sort of bug. What if the doctor had been wrong? If Steve knew what Billy had said, he would freak out. Without letting him know why, I called and gently persuaded him to see another doctor.

  A few days later, Steve phoned. “The doctor said I just have an infection that's hanging on. Nothing to worry about. He gave me some more antibiotics.”

  Again, from far away I heard Billy's sinister laugh. This time it was louder and sounded truly evil as it echoed around my ceiling.

  Trying to keep cool, I told Steve, “I want you to see someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know. Go see Florence. I'm sure she'll fit you in this afternoon.”

  Florence was Steve's primary doctor. Maybe the specialists were being too specialized. Steve called me from her office.

  “My EKG looks suspicious. Florence is sending me to see a cardiologist.” Later that day, Steve was in the hospital having an angiogram.

  I knew that an angiogram often led to other things. I threw some clothes in a suitcase and headed to the city. The following morning, when the doctors came to Steve's hospital room and told us he needed bypass surgery, my head began to spin. On top of being worried about Steve, hospitals make me shaky. When I was fifteen, I had an emergency appendectomy that I almost didn't survive, a nightmare from start to finish.

  Just as I was on the verge of losing it, Billy's soothing presence came out of nowhere and snapped me out of my panic. I became very calm and focused. Looking around the hospital, I didn't like what I saw. Dirty. Disorganized. When the surgeon came by to say he'd be operating on Steve the next day, I gave him the cold shoulder. Then I made some calls and located the best heart surgeon in New York City. As Steve was being lifted into a special cardiac ambulance at midnight for a transfer, I looked up at the dark inky sky and said, “Thanks, Billy.”

  At the second hospital they discovered that a drug Steve was getting at the first hospital could have made him bleed to death on the operating table. His surgery was postponed until the drug cleared his system.

  The open-heart surgery went well, much quicker than expected. Because we caught his medical problem in time, there was no damage to Steve's heart. Billy had scared me to make sure I would be persistent. This wasn't green tea. This was life and death.

  Billy stopped talking to me for a while. He knew I needed time. This last incident shook me up. I was beyond grateful, but had a lot of questions.

  Before they were born, had Steve agreed to be Billy's protector during his last years on earth?

  Had Billy agreed to repay the favor after he was dead?

  Did Billy need permission to tell me Steve was in trouble?

  If it hadn't been for Billy's intervention, would Steve have had a heart attack?

  Could Steve have died?

  Had Billy changed Steve's destiny?

  As a cosmic detective, I was determined to find answers. But how? Each day, as the autumn advanced, Billy hovered peacefully, invisibly, silently, at a respectful distance.

  Hoping for inspiration, I waited for the full moon. Seated on my meditation cushion at midnight with the scent of jasmine candles wafting around me, I wrote my questions on a notepad. It was a relief to get them out of my head and onto paper. I closed my eyes and went to where there was no thought, no space, no time.

  When I blinked my eyes open an hour later, instead of answers I scribbled down the core of my inquiry: Can the other side intervene in our lives?

  The following evening, an indigo blue October night, Billy's light rose high above me like an angel.

  Annie, Annie, wake up.

  Haven't I proved to you, my sister, that I am real? And much more important than the fact that I am real is that there are other places—places other than earth—that are real, full of light and love and bliss. And maybe, just maybe some light can come from those places to make life on your planet a little better, a little kinder, a little more musical.

  I have a visitor with me tonight. Can you see the aura of golden blue light in the corner of the room? He's Pat, a very strong and noble spirit.

  Does he remind you of Tex? He should, because he's her older brother. As you know, Pat was killed when Tex was just a teenager, killed what you would call tragically, in a plane crash, on his way home for a Thanksgiving visit.

  Well, Pat is kind of Tex's guardian now. Tex's mother and Patty Malone and all those on this side of things who love Tex would like me to send her a letter, so please write
this down.

  Dear Tex,

  Just because you're exhausted from your mom's illness and her death, you don't have to destroy yourself. Destroying yourself with alcohol isn't the greatest way to handle hard times.

  I know you like the idea of fate. Well, maybe your fate is to become bigger than your addictions. Maybe this is the defining moment of your spirit. Maybe you want to stick around awhile without your body nagging at you saying, “I'm a mess.”

  It was really fun for me! No teeth, bloated, hair falling out, my knees killing me, coughing up blood. Oh, you can get away with it for a certain amount of time, but then there's the piper to pay.

  You're giving yourself the silent treatment, just like you want to give everyone the silent treatment when it comes to this very tender subject. So I'll give it to you tender.

  You're going to have to cut this out before your body starts screaming at you for attention.

  Let's just start with one tiny baby step. Start to develop an awareness of what you're doing. No judgment. No false commitments. Just start letting what you're doing enter into your consciousness.

  Billy

  I was able to see the blue ball of light that Billy identified as Tex's brother floating in the corner of my room. I didn't understand, though, why Billy called him Patty Malone. Tex's deceased brother was named Pat, but their family name isn't Malone.

  Later that morning, I called Tex.

  “Billy came to me in the middle of the night and brought your brother Pat with him.”

  “Really?”

  “And Billy gave me a letter for you. It's from Billy and Pat and all the people on the other side who love you.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “For some reason Billy mentioned the name Patty Malone. But that's an Irish name and your family's French, right?”

  “Here we are again,” Tex laughed. “Billy's doing it again. Malone isn't my name but my mother was Irish— she was a Malone. And her father, who was, of course, my grandfather, his name was Patty Malone. So the letter must be from my brother Pat and also my grandfather. This is amazing! E-mail me the letter right now.”

  I was hesitant. Tex almost always had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, but I'd never seen her drunk. I was sure that the subject of her drinking was off limits, but I forged ahead.

  “Listen, Tex. I have to tell you, the letter's about your drinking.”

  Tex was silent. I could feel the frost from the other end of the phone.

  It was definitely time to hang up; I did, however, e-mail her Billy's letter.

  I hoped it wouldn't end our friendship.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Cosmic Sound

  Finally, right before Thanksgiving, the UPS man brought me the beat-up cardboard box that contained Billy's possessions. It had been sitting in the Mercedes dealer's showroom since Billy's death ten months ago. Billy had been living out of his old Mercedes until he totaled it the week before his death. Everything he'd had in that car was now inside the 10-by-19-by-13-inch tattered cardboard box with the words “Don't touch” scrawled across it in black magic marker.

  I put the box next to the fireplace, just below Billy's ashes. I wasn't ready to open it. It reminded me of the old Billy, the one who got high, who had to live out of his car, who crashed it into a tree, who could have killed someone. Still, I was curious. What was in the box that the new Billy wanted me to have?

  On Thanksgiving morning . . .

  Why not open the box on Christmas? It's just a month away. You'll wake up to a gorgeous snow and it will be my gift.

  When I talk to you, you hear the same voice speaking in the same language you've always heard. I use my Billy voice for your benefit, Princess. We don't use words where I am. Joseph and I use telepathy to hear each other's thoughts. They aren't thoughts, really. They are much more wonderful than thoughts. These better-thanthoughts are like symphonies so gorgeous you cannot even imagine them.

  On earth, people say things for a lot of reasons. Sometimes they mean what they say, sometimes they don't. There is no pretense or falseness here. There is no competitiveness or resentment. Here, our telepathic communications fill each other with beauty.

  Speaking of telepathy, I know you've sometimes wondered if there's any music here. There are so many clichés about angels singing and harps playing, and you're curious if any of these ideas are true. Well, once again I can only speak for myself. There aren't exactly any of those things where I am. Here the atmosphere is filled with a soft, ambient sound. I haven't been analyzing, just enjoying, but I'll do a little analyzing for you.

  There's a constant background haze that reminds me of earth's natural sounds, like wind or rain or ocean waves. It's more musical than that though, so I'm pretty sure it's created by instruments of some kind. The sounds resemble soft dreamy-type violins and cellos, flutes and horns and harps. There's also rhythm here, but it isn't steady. It's a pulsation that's constantly changing.

  Recently, I began to notice that sometimes this haze bursts into a little melody and then that melody quickly disappears. This melody phenomenon is happening more and more, and I really can't say if it's the sound that's changed, or my ability to hear it.

  By the way, if you could tune in, you'd hear these cosmic sounds right where you are now, because they exist everywhere. You can't hear them with your regular ears, though—just your spiritual ones. Even if your regular ears could hear the music, they're too busy listening to a hundred million other things to listen to these sounds. Your inner spiritual ears could hear them, but they're also preoccupied listening to a hundred million different thoughts.

  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case instead of a picture I offer you an iTunes file. Certain music written by the composer Sibelius gives you an idea of what the cosmic sound is like. Sibelius was definitely tuned to a higher dimension. I'm not talking about his darker pieces, but download his swan music and notice how the swells of sound break into melodies. This will give you a hint of what I hear, except what I hear is infinitely lighter and more sublime.

  And sometimes, baby sister, once in a while, I hear a voice, a distant feminine voice singing in some language I've never heard and don't understand. This voice has the allure of what I imagine is a siren's song, but the voice couldn't belong to a so-called siren because they lure men to their deaths and as you know I died some time ago [laughs]. This singing is so intoxicating that when I hear it I want more. I'm not used to wanting anything, but I promise you no one could resist longing for this voice.

  Swan music? Sibelius? I'd heard of the composer but knew nothing about his music.

  I went to iTunes, typed in “Sibelius,” found a piece called The Swan of Tuonela, and downloaded the file. Melodies flowed in and out of a soft ambient haze of sound like the celestial music Billy had described.

  As it turns out, The Swan of Tuonela is a Finnish legend. The sacred white swan swims in the dark mystical Tuonela River that separates this world from the next. It was the same role Billy had assigned me, navigating the waters between dimensions.

  I e-mailed the music to Guru Guy along with Billy's notes. He sent me back an article about Sibelius that had appeared in the New Yorker magazine honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the composer's death.

  The article said that Sibelius believed some of his music came from a Divine source. It also revealed that Sibelius had been an alcoholic. Perhaps Sibelius’ addiction had been an essential part of who he was, just like Billy. Would he have been the same genius without it? Who can say it should have been some other way—for either of them?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Billy Box

  A Billy had promised, it did snow on Christmas. I started a fire, and with it, the Billy effect brightened the room.

  Merry Christmas, Annie. The key you'll find in the box is a symbol of the keys to life I help you uncover. Did I ever tell you what a lovely home you have? I didn't have a home at the end. Home, as they say, is where the he
art is.

  The first thing I pulled from the box was an empty dented blue canister with the word “Home” and a swan painted on it. Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela?

  Next came a spyglass.

  In honor of your role as the Sherlock Holmes of the world beyond, Billy joked.

  The box contained framed pictures and photo albums from Billy's life, pre-Venezuela. There were also several envelopes filled with photographs of him in Margarita; Billy with different women, Billy in the water, Billy on the beach, smiling and having fun.

  Things don't look like they were so bad for me, do they? I was sometimes having a pretty good time there in Margarita. Not so serious, right?

  We were looking over things together, discussing them. Even though Billy was somewhere across the Universe, he was also in the room with me.

  There were CDs and some books: Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, The Language of the Heart by Bill W, the founder of AA, and Living Each Day by Rabbi Twerski. Underneath the books were four beat-up old spiral notebooks. They were Billy's journals.

  “You kept a journal? Can I read them?”

  I gave them to you, didn't I?

  At the bottom of the Billy Box, hiding in a corner, was a pink quartz heart, a mother-of-pearl pillbox, the key that Billy said would be there, and two Alcoholics Anonymous coins.

  The gold coin was from White Deer Run. My best rehab experience. Stayed straight for eight years after that.

  The other coin was silver. It had a cross on it and read, “But for the grace of God.”

  My mantra when I was alive.

  As I was looking though Billy's things, Tex called.

  “Annie. I think I'm going to Arizona for a month. Sometime in January.”

  “That's a nice long vacation.”

  “It's not actually a vacation. I'm playing with the idea of going to rehab.”