Before and Afterlives

by Christopher Barzak

  The barbed wire boy lifted a lid and gathered a swirl of honey on his fingertip. He turned to offer it to the minister’s daughter and said, “My father says this is the true nectar of heaven.”

  “Eat of my flesh,” said the minister’s daughter, and lowered her mouth. Carefully she licked the honey from the tip of his finger and afterward pulled his mouth down to meet hers. She tasted tangy and sweet. She tasted of blood and honey.

  She took the barbed wire boy by his hand and walked him away from the hives, off the path, to lie in a patch of daisies. With each touch the girl sucked in her breath, with each release she sighed. And later, while they lay among the shredded flowers, blood red on the white petals, it was the barbed wire boy who could do nothing but sigh and moan in exquisite pain.

  His head was full of her then, every day for the next week. His thoughts ran to nothing but the minister’s daughter. If the beekeeper asked him a question, the boy didn’t hear. If dark clouds gathered over the forest and lightning cracked the sky open, the boy didn’t notice. When he went with the beekeeper to check on the hives, he filled the bee boxes with enough smoke to knock the bees out for days. “What’s wrong with you?” asked the beekeeper. “Is this something to do with Jesus?”

  The barbed wire boy only smiled and said nothing, and the beekeeper suddenly felt something like a notion of worry over his son’s well-being. He understood his boy’s sadness, his boy’s pain. These things defined living, thought the beekeeper. But when the barbed wire boy stumbled along the forest floor with a stupid grin on his face, tripping happily, he suspected the worst. Love, thought the beekeeper. My boy’s in love.

  Though the beekeeper worried over the barbed wire boy’s happiness like a town mother over the state of the boy’s soul, it didn’t matter. Parents worry over their children constantly. In the end they can do nothing to protect them. The barbed wire boy would have to learn his own lesson, thought the beekeeper. And he would do that. He would come to learn this the following Sunday, at the Feast of Love.

  When he arrived, the congregation was already sitting at long stretches of picnic tables outside the church doors. The tables were heaped with a variety of dishes. Baskets full of fruit, roast of turkey, three-tiered cakes covered in creamy frosting and strawberries, lamb chops and mint jelly, bowls of pink and orange ambrosia. His mouth watered. He was about to comment on how perfect everything was when he turned from the food to find everyone staring, brows furrowed, eyes slanted. A town mother opened her mouth and said one word, “wicked,” and fell silent again.

  He searched for the face of the minister’s daughter, that beacon, but she was nowhere to be found. He furrowed his brow then too, uncomprehending, until the minister himself came out the front doors of the church and stood on the top step to give a sermon.

  “God has sent us many abominations to deal with these days,” said the minister. “People are evil. They destroy buildings, fornicate before marriage, fornicate with their own gender, they want to take God out of our children’s education. These are dark times indeed,” he said regretfully. “It is a test. A test from God for His chosen. He is giving us these problems to sort out who is with Him and who is without. Why even in church abominations have crept inside to sit among us. Oh yes,” said the minister, “do not think the Lord doesn’t work mysteriously. You are not protected here in His house even. This is the testing ground, my friends.“

  The barbed wire boy swallowed, trying not to listen, for he realized the sermon was directed at him. When the minister said “abomination”, he had looked at the boy. He felt stupid having come, not realizing the graveness of his error. Of course the minister would know what had happened between the barbed wire boy and his daughter. She would have gone home cut and bloody. She would have had no way to deny what they had done.

  He turned to leave and though the minister continued his sermon, everyone watched the boy. He would not be able to return, he realized. He would not be able to sit and eat at their table. His leaving would only confirm their belief that God had sent him as an abomination, that the minister’s words had caused him to leave. Perhaps I am an abomination, he thought as he walked through the woods back to his father’s cabin.

  He started to cry. Tears streamed down the barbed wire embedded in his cheeks, and soon he was running through the woods, faster and faster, pushing away branches, shredding leaves, until he came to his father’s hives. Here the buzz of bees was loud in his ears. A hum, a mantra, a constant praying. He knew then why his father preferred his bees over anything.

  Standing over the boxes, he watched them crawl inside, hundreds of them moving through the hexagonal caverns, their lion’s bodies tight within the tunnels. And somewhere in that labyrinth, their queen.

  He lifted the lid of a hive without smoking them and brushed his hand over their furry backs as if they were only animals in a petting zoo. The bees scurried though, frightened, fluttering their wings, lifting into the air until they were a cloud surrounding him, swarming. He closed his eyes as they landed and lit upon him, tilted his face toward the sun. Lift me up, he thought, into the blue air. But they were afraid of his disturbance and attacked instead.

  He sucked in his breath as the bees began to sting him. He gasped like the minister’s daughter had when his barbs slid into her. His flesh swelled, burning with poison. And there in the woods, with only the bees as witness, the barbed wire boy felt the nearness of God once more. The pain of his mother giving birth, the worry on his father’s face at the first sign of happiness, the hurt that turns the world.

  The stings. The stings of love.

  Map of Seventeen

  Everyone has secrets. Even me. We carry them with us like contraband, always swaddled in some sort of camouflage we’ve concocted to hide the parts of ourselves the rest of the world is better off not knowing. I’d write what I’m thinking in a diary if I could believe others would stay out of those pages, but in a house like this there’s no such thing as privacy. If you’re going to keep secrets, you have to learn to write them down inside your own heart. And then be sure not to give that away to anyone either. At least not to just anyone at all.

  Which is what bothers me abouthim, the guy my brother is apparently going to marry. Talk about secrets. Off Tommy goes to New York City for college, begging my parents to help him with money for four straight years, then after graduating at the top of his class—in studio art, of all things (not even a degree that will get him a job to help pay off the loans our parents took out for his education)—he comes home to tell us he’s gay, and before we can say anything, good or bad, runs off again and won’t return our calls. And when he did start talking to Mom and Dad again, it was just short phone conversations and emails, asking for help, for more money.

  Five years of off and on silence and here he is, bringing home some guy named Tristan who plays the piano better than my mother and has never seen a cow except on TV. We’re supposed to treat this casually and not bring up the fact that he ran away without letting us say anything at all four years ago, and to try not to embarrass him. That’s Tommy Terlecki, my big brother, the gay surrealist Americana artist who got semi-famous not for the magical creatures and visions he paints, but for his horrifically exaggerated family portraits of us dressed up in ridiculous roles:American Gothic, dad holding a pitchfork, mom presenting her knitting needles and a ball of yarn to the viewer as if she’s coaxing you to give them a try, me with my arms folded under my breasts, my face angry within the frame of my bonnet, scowling at Tommy, who’s sitting on the ground beside my legs in the portrait, pulling off the Amish-like clothes. What I don’t like about these paintings is that he’s lied about us in them. The Tommy in the portrait is constrained by his family’s way of life, but it’s Tommy who’s put us in those clothes to begin with. They’re how he sees us, not the way we are, but he gets to dramatize a conflict with us in the paintings anyway, even though it’s a conflict he himself has imagined.

  Still, I could be practical and say
theAmerican Gothic series made Tommy’s name, which is more than I can say for the new stuff he’s working on:The Sons of Melusine. They’re like his paintings of magical creatures, which the critic who picked his work out of his first group show found too precious in comparison to the “promise of the self-aware, absurdist family portraits this precocious young man from the wilderness of Ohio has also created.” Thank you, Google, for keeping me informed on my brother’s activities.The Sons of Melusine are all bare-chested men with curvy muscles who have serpentine tails and faces like Tristan’s, all of them extremely attractive and extremely in pain: out of water mostly, gasping for air in the back alleys of cities, parched and bleeding on beaches, strung on fishermen’s line, the hook caught in the flesh of a cheek. A new Christ, is how Tommy described them when he showed them to us, and Mom and Dad said, “Hmm, I see.”

  He wants to hang anAmerican Gothic in the living room, he told us, after we’d been sitting around talking for a while, all of us together for the first time in years, his boyfriend Tristan smiling politely as we tried to catch up with Tommy’s doings while trying to be polite and ask Tristan about himself as well. “My life is terribly boring, I’m afraid,” Tristan said when I asked what he does in the city. “My family’s well off, you see, so what I do is mostly whatever seems like fun at any particular moment.”

  Well off. Terribly boring. Whatever seems like fun at any particular moment.I couldn’t believe my brother was dating this guy, let alone planning to marry him. This is Tommy, I reminded myself, and right then was when he said, “If it’s okay with you, Mom and Dad, I’d like to hang one of theAmerican Gothic paintings in here. Seeing how Tristan and I will be staying with you for a while, it’d be nice to add some touches of our own.”

  Tommy smiled. Tristan smiled and gave Mom a little shrug of his shoulders. I glowered at them from across the room, arms folded across my chest on purpose. Tommy noticed and, with a concerned face, asked me if something was wrong. “Just letting life imitate art,” I told him, but he only kept on looking puzzled. Faker, I thought. He knows exactly what I mean.

  Halfway through that first evening, I realized this was how it was going to be as long as Tommy and Tristan were with us, while they waited for their own house to be built next to Mom and Dad’s: Tommy conducting us all like the head of an orchestra, waving his magic wand. He had Mom and Tristan sit on the piano bench together and tap out some “Heart and Soul”. He sang along behind them for a moment, before looking over his shoulder and waving Dad over to join in. When he tried to pull me in with that charming squinty-eyed devil grin that always gets anyone—our parents, teachers, the local police officers who used to catch him speeding down back roads—to do his bidding, I shook my head, said nothing, and left the room. “Meg?” he said behind me. Then the piano stopped and I could hear them whispering, wondering what had set me off this time.

  I’m not known for being easy to live with. Between Tommy’s flare for making people live life like a painting when he’s around, and my stubborn, immovable will, I’m sure our parents must have thought at some time or other that their real children had been swapped in the night with changelings. It would explain the way Tommy could make anyone like him, even out in the country, where people don’t always think well of gay people. It would explain the creatures he paints that people always look nervous about after viewing them, the half-animal beings that roam the streets of cities and back roads of villages in his first paintings. It would explain how I can look at any math problem or scientific equation my teachers put before me and figure them out without breaking a sweat. And my aforementioned will. My will, this thing that’s so strong I sometimes feel like it’s another person inside me.

  Our mother is a mousy figure here in the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio. The central square is not even really a square but an intersection of two highways where town hall, a general store, beauty salon and Presbyterian church all face each other like lost old women casting glances over the asphalt, hoping one of the others knows where they are and where they’re going, for surely why would anyone stop here? My mother works in the library, which used to be a one-room schoolhouse a hundred years ago, where they still use a stamp card to keep track of the books checked out. My father is one of the township trustees and he also runs our farm. We raise beef cattle, Herefords mostly, though a few Hereford and Angus mixes are in our herd, so you sometimes get black cows with polka-dotted white faces. I never liked the mixed calves, I’m not sure why, but Tommy always said they were his favorites. Mutts are always smarter than streamlined gene pools, he said. Me? I always thought they looked like heartbroken mimes with dark, dewy eyes.

  From upstairs in my room I could hear the piano start again, this time a classical song. It had to be Tristan. Mom only knows songs like “Heart and Soul” and just about any song in a hymn book. They attend, I don’t. Tommy and I gave up church ages ago. I still consider myself a Christian, just not the church-going kind. We’re lucky to have parents who asked us why we didn’t want to go, instead of forcing us like tyrants. When I told them I didn’t feel I was learning what I needed to live in the world there, instead of getting mad, they just nodded and Mom said, “If that’s the case, perhaps it’s best that you walk your own way for a while, Meg.”

  They’re sogood. That’s the problem with my parents. They’re so good, it’s like they’re children or something, innocent and naïve. Definitely not stupid, but way too easy on other people. They never fuss with Tommy. They let him treat them like they’re these horrible people who ruined his life and they never say a word. They hug him and calm him down instead, treat him like a child. I don’t get it. Tommy’s the oldest. Isn’t he the one who’s supposed to be mature and put together well?

  I listened to Tristan’s notes drift up through the ceiling from the living room below, and lay on my bed, staring at a tiny speck on the ceiling, a stain or odd flaw in the plaster that has served as my focal point for anger for many years. Since I can remember, whenever I got angry, I’d come up here and lie in this bed and stare at that speck, pouring all of my frustrations into it, as if it were a black hole that could suck up all the bad. I’ve given that speck so much of my worst self over the years, I’m surprised it hasn’t grown darker and wider, big enough to cast a whole person into its depths. When I looked at it now, I found I didn’t have as much anger to give it as I’d thought. But no, that wasn’t it either. I realized all of my anger was floating around the room instead, buoyed up by the notes of the piano, by Tristan’s playing. I thought I could even see those notes shimmer into being for a brief moment, electrified by my frustration. When I blinked, though, the air looked normal again, and Tristan had brought his melody to a close.

  There was silence for a minute, some muffled voices, then Mom started up “Amazing Grace”. I felt immediately better and breathed a sigh of relief. Then someone knocked on my door and it swung open a few inches, enough for Tommy to peek inside. “Hey, Sis. Can I come in?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Well,” said Tommy. “Sort of.”

  We laughed. We could laugh about things we agreed on.

  “Sooo,” said Tommy, “what’s a guy gotta do around here to get a hug from his little sister?”

  “Aren’t you a little old for hugs?”

  “Ouch. I must have done something really bad this time.”

  “Not bad. Something. I don’t know what.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Maybe.”

  Tommy sat down on the corner of my bed and craned his neck to scan the room. “What happened to all the unicorns and horses?”

  “They died,” I said. “Peacefully, in their sleep, in the middle of the night. Thank God.”

  He laughed, which made me smirk without wanting to. This was the other thing Tommy had always been able to do: make it hard for people to stay mad at him. “So you’re graduating in another month?” he said. I nodded, turned my pillow over so I could brace it under my arm to hold me
up more comfortably. “Are you scared?”

  “About what?” I said. “Is there something I should be scared of?”

  “You know. The future. The rest of your life. You won’t be a little girl anymore.”

  “I haven’t been a little girl for a while, Tommy.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said, standing up, tucking his hands into his pockets like he does whenever he’s being Big Brother. “You’re going to have to begin making big choices,” he said. “What you want out of life. You know it’s not a diploma you receive when you cross the graduation stage. It’s really a ceremony where your training wheels are taken off. The cap everyone wants to throw in the air is a symbol of what you’ve been so far in life: a student. That’s right, everyone wants to cast it off so quickly, eager to get out into the world. Then they realize they’ve got only a couple of choices for what to do next. The armed service, college or working at a gas station. It’s too bad we don’t have a better way to recognize what the meaning of graduation really is. Right now, I think it leaves you kids a little clueless.”

  “Tommy,” I said, “yes, you’re eleven years older than me. You know more than I do. But really, you need to learn when to shut the hell up and stop sounding pompous.”

  We laughed again. I’m lucky that, no matter what makes me mad about my brother, we can laugh at ourselves together.

  “So what are you upset about then?” he asked after we settled down.

  “Them,” I said, trying to get serious again. “Mom and Dad. Tommy, have you thought about what this is going to do to them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what the town’s going to say? Tommy, do you know in their church newsletter they have a prayer list and our family is on it?”