After Life

by Rhian Ellis

  All night I pictured myself at home, in bed, while my astral self drove the Oldsmobile down toward Louisiana. My silver cord must have been as fine as spider thread by this time; subatomically thin, perhaps. I imagined it fluttering through the gap between the car window and the frame, battered by semis and pickup trucks, and now, as the road curved and turned back on itself, winding around the body of the car like cobwebs. Sooner or later it would break. Back in bed, I’d feel a sharp but tiny tug, like someone plucking a hair from the middle of my chest, and then an emptiness. Maybe the colors of my room would seem to fade. Then I’d get colder and colder and weaker and weaker until I couldn’t move at all. But the car would keep driving.

  At noon I stopped somewhere in West Virginia, my whole body humming with exhaustion and the vibration of the car engine. It was a beautiful day. The sunlight shone cleanly through bare trees. I bought gas and a bottle of pop at a Stop-n-Save, then drove across the highway to a small motel.

  There were motels like this one in Wallamee—pretty yellow clapboard, green trim, window boxes and brightly painted porch chairs—but most of them had been converted to retirement homes or Christian schools when the interstate bypassed the town. This one looked as if it had drawn a small but steady stream of customers every night for thirty years. There was a fenced pool in front. Though it was too late in the year to swim, no one had bothered to cover or drain it. Its blue water winked and trembled.

  The girl behind the front desk told me that check-in time was two o’clock. The maids needed time to clean the rooms, she said, keeping an eye on the television set in the corner of the lobby. The girl was young enough to be in school, I was sure. I tried to remember what day of the week it was but couldn’t.

  “Well, I’m here now,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

  “You could keep going, though there’s not much down that way for a while. Or you could go to an early matinee.”

  So I left the car at the motel and walked toward town. The movie theater was a hexaplex, a large flat brown building in the middle of a parking lot, with a light-up sign of abbreviated movie titles, THE CLM was one, BLE LSITN another. I imagined years of windy nights in this West Virginia town, entire alphabets set to flight.

  The movie I chose turned out to be an urban-office thriller. I ate some of my smuggled-in Fig Newtons and watched a copy machine plunge from the top of a high-rise building before I fell asleep, my head tilted over the back of my seat. I dreamed about Vivian. Vivian in an Easter dress, Vivian winning a trophy for something, Vivian running across a wide lawn toward me and throwing her arms around my neck. When I woke up the lights had come back on, and someone was shaking my shoulder.

  “Ma’am?” said a girl’s voice. “Ma’am?” I jumped and turned to her. She looked just like the motel clerk girl, only with a white shirt and a black bow tie and her hair up in a top knot. She was as startled as I was, her blue eyes wide and rimmed with mascara. “Ma’am,” she said again. “The movie’s over.”

  In my motel room I slept deeply and dreamlessly, sprawled across the bedspread in my clothes and shoes. I woke up briefly at sunset and drank a glass of tap water. Outside, a family with arms loaded down with fast-food bags passed my window, and the sky beyond the hills was dark orange. I thought about getting something hot to eat: a box of chicken, maybe, or a fat hamburger and onion rings. I was dizzy with hunger, but even more tired, so I lay down on the bed again and pulled the bedspread over my shoulder and watched orange shadows move across the bumpy plaster ceiling until I fell asleep.

  It was one in the morning when I got up, suddenly jittery with the idea that I had to get driving again. I took a shower and changed my clothes and ate a piece of cheese from a plastic Baggie I’d brought. The motel office was closed, so I slid the key through the mail slot in the door. I heard it clatter onto the rug.

  Night took me across Kentucky and part of Tennessee. I went through a city by accident, but missed the name of it, since I was paying attention only to the highway number signs. I saw a giant spinning cow on a pole, billboards for suicide hotlines, a double semi painted with the name of someone who must have been a famous country musician: the letters were spelled out in airbrushed stars and lassoes. Bank signs blinked the time and temperature: 50°, 2:15.

  I slept through another day in a motel room somewhere in Tennessee, waking up to eat an egg salad sandwich I’d bought at a gas station. It tasted like a mouthful of vinegar.

  It was night again, my third night of driving, when I came to a roadblock. I was in the middle of Mississippi, though I’d noticed nothing about the state except for a bad smell—like backed-up sewers. Now and then, far from the highway, there’d be a huge complex of brightly lit smokestacks. This is where the smell came from—sugar factories, maybe. I had driven myself numb and could think of nothing but staying in my lane, a safe distance from the car ahead of me, but now all the other cars had disappeared, and I was alone on the highway.

  A cop with a glowing orange stick was standing in the middle of the road, waving his arms. Behind him the road curved, and I couldn’t see what was back there, just some flashing lights—more cop cars, it looked like. I remembered, horrified: I don’t have a driver’s license. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to turn around. Perhaps I could just run him over. Before I had a chance to do either of these things, I was putting on the brakes and the cop was walking toward me. I took a breath and opened the window.

  “Howdy, ma’am. How are you this evening?” He was black and seemed very tall.

  “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”

  “Not bad, considering. We got a real mess up there. Nasty accident. They got to clean up the road before I can let you through.”

  “I see.”

  The cop looked over at the passenger seat, at the map and the bags of food.

  “Traveling, huh?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “All the way from New York.”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, well. You sure you’re all right, ma’am?”

  “I’m tired,” I said, and it was true.

  “Well, I won’t keep you much longer. There’s a coffee and doughnuts place not too far up the road. You might want to take a break.”

  “Thank you. Maybe I will.”

  The cop stood up and his walkie-talkie crackled on.

  “All right,” he said to me after a minute or two. “You can proceed.”

  I drove on, relieved. Just around the bend in the road there was a semi parked crookedly on the shoulder, its back doors flung wide open. People were milling around, not terribly urgently, and more police were arriving as I neared the scene. Something had spilled all over the road. It was dark and wet and had an odd but familiar smell, which I couldn’t place. I drove through it cautiously, trying to keep from spraying whatever it was over the people along the road. Besides the semi, there were two other cars involved. One was upside down, sitting on its flattened roof, and the other was smashed from the front. This car was piled high with the dark wet stuff. A person was lying on the shoulder of the highway, blue jeans bloodied, his arms reaching up over his head.

  And then I was past it. Police lights flashed in my rearview mirror, but soon they were gone too. A few miles later an ambulance screamed by.

  Dog food, I thought. The semi had been full of wet dog food. Though I had never owned a dog myself, I recognized the smell—like a dog’s mouth.

  Death is a horror.

  I drove for an hour or two more. It was becoming clear that though I’d slept all day, it wasn’t enough. I daydreamed about my bedroom in Train Line on summer nights: the cool and shady quiet, the sound of neighbors’ wind chimes, the smell of the lake. My longing for it felt like starvation. I would go back, wouldn’t I? Any life besides the one inside this big black car was impossible to imagine.

  Signs for an exit loomed up ahead. Nothing would be open, I thought; there were no big towns around here. The landscape was barren and unlit, with no hills. But I pulle
d off, anyway, thinking I could find a parking lot to sleep in.

  But there was something open: a twenty-four-hour gas station and a doughnut shop. They were lit up like a UFO landing pad. Nothing on my trip had looked so welcoming. I pulled the Oldsmobile down the exit ramp and across the parking lot, then stopped under the wide green awning to fill my tank. There was no one else around, except for the shape of the person behind the cash register inside. It reminded me of my time at the Ha-Ha, and of being held up, and I wondered if the cashier wondered, even briefly, if I might be the one who’d do it.

  I didn’t. I wiped my hands on a stiff blue paper towel and went inside to pay. It was cool in there and smelled of fried things, chicken and corn dogs and doughnuts from the adjoining shop, and quiet music came from over the speakers. The cashier was a young boy with a pink face. He might have been sleeping, head on the checkout counter, until I showed up.

  “Is the doughnut shop open?” I asked, handing over the money.

  “Yup,” he said. “Don’t never close. Can’t even lock the door—don’t need to, you know, if you don’t never close.”

  So I took my change and went outside to move the car, then came back to the doughnut shop.

  The same bland music played in here, but even more quietly, and the smell of doughnuts was overwhelming: sweet and greasy and warm. The woman behind the counter asked if she could help me.

  I looked over the racks and told her I’d like a custard-filled one with chocolate on it and a cup of coffee.

  She put my doughnut on a small china plate, filled a cup with coffee, and handed them to me. I carried them carefully to a small table next to the windows, where I could watch people fill up their tanks while I ate. The table was shiny yellow Formica, and the chairs were hard orange plastic with metal legs. Outside, on the highway, headlights came and went.

  I had taken a bite of my doughnut and was staring out the window when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the shape of someone coming toward me. I turned to look. It was a man in a blue shirt and khaki pants, carrying his own doughnut and coffee and smiling widely.

  “May I sit with you?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  It was Peter.

  He didn’t look any different. His hair was shiny and black, his sleeves were rolled up, his lashes were long behind his glasses. But at the same time he did not look twenty-two. He looked older, he looked my age, but he looked the same. This is the only thing that was odd.

  He bit into his doughnut and continued smiling while he chewed. It was filled with lemon creme. Yellow stuff oozed onto the plate and powdered sugar clung to his lips.

  I didn’t know what to say. I sipped my coffee and took quick glances at him.

  “I missed you, Naomi,” said Peter.

  My heart crumpled. I did not know what to think: whether I’d lost my mind, whether I was dreaming, or whether this was as real as anything could be. I wanted it to be real. I longed for it.

  “Peter…”

  He put his finger over his mouth. “Shh. You don’t have to say anything.”

  So I watched him eat. He seemed to enjoy his doughnut a great deal. He chewed it slowly, licked his lips, and put it down between bites to drink his coffee. Peter would sometimes look like this, I remembered, when things had worked out better than we had planned, when circumstances had come together in a certain, perfect way. One Sunday morning the summer we met, we went on a picnic and found the perfect spot for it under a tree, and the weather was just warm enough, and he had the Sunday paper to read. I remembered there was a breeze and the ripples in the lake flashed silver. That time he’d smiled just like this: half to himself, half to let me know how happy he was.

  But when he finished his doughnut, his smile faded. In the fluorescent light his skin was sallow and pale.

  “Why did you do it, Naomi?”

  I couldn’t answer at first. When I tried to speak, my voice felt choked.

  “I didn’t…”

  “I know,” he said bitterly. “You didn’t mean it. Why should I care about that?”

  He wasn’t wearing his watch. I was. I noticed the pale ring of flesh around his wrist and tried to push my sleeve down to cover the watch, but he saw it anyway and shrugged. Then he rubbed his hands down over his ribs, his stomach. His eyes filled with tears.

  “I wanted to grow old,” he said. “I wanted to grow old and fat!”

  I cried out and reached for him. I grabbed his wrist and shoulder and pulled myself over the table toward him. He was as solid as anything, his skin was warm, and when I pushed my face into the place between his throat and his shirt collar I could feel the rough, shaved skin of his neck and I smelled him. He smelled like he always did, but I had forgotten that smell. It was sweet and peppery and like ironed clothes. With my fingers I felt the buttons on his shirt, opened one and slipped my hand inside. There was hair on his chest. It was his chest. I remembered the pattern of hair and how silky it was around his nipples. My hand came to life, feeling it. I wanted him, I wanted his body.

  Abruptly he pushed me back into my seat. Tears pooled behind his glasses and ran down his face. “I can’t,” he said. He stood up and carried his empty doughnut plate and coffee cup to the front counter.

  “Thank you,” he told the woman, who nodded.

  He headed for the men’s room, wiping his face with the back of his hand. I got up and followed. When the door swung shut behind him I tried to open it and go in, but it only moved a few inches. Peter was standing on the other side, holding it shut. I tried throwing myself against the door, shoulder first, and I tried bracing my feet on the hard tile floor and pushing steadily. Nothing worked.

  “Peter!” I whispered through the door. “Please, what’s it like? Are you lonely? Is your family there? Please—tell me—”

  I shoved and struggled with the door for what seemed like forever, but Peter was stronger.

  Finally I gave up. I went back to my seat and finished my doughnut. Crumbs were scattered across Peter’s side of the table. My coffee was cool. I drank it anyway.

  When I went back to check the men’s room, it was empty. There was a dirty urinal with a pink cake of something like soap in the bowl and one stall. Peter wasn’t in it.

  Back out in the parking lot, a wind had picked up. It was the kind of wind that blows just before dawn, a warm wind that smelled of car exhaust and fields and water. I took deep breaths of it and shook my hair out, walking back to my car.

  If he had lived, I would have stopped loving him. I was so sorry.

  13

  after life

  In the Train Line Spiritualist Museum there was a collection of photographs that each showed a medium materializing a spirit. I spent part of one summer cataloging them and filing the ones not chosen for display. They were some of the strangest and most grotesque pictures I’d ever seen. In one, a woman in a Victorian dress lay back in her chair, arms slack at her sides, while a lumpy white substance poured from the side of her mouth. Another showed a woman with something stringy and gray spouting from her ear. Sometimes the ectoplasm took the shape of wads of fabric that draped itself around the medium’s body. This substance—which was usually wet or sticky or gelatinous, but sometimes hard and dry—was gradually supposed to resolve itself into a more human shape, and the result would be a perfectly formed spirit, solid enough to slap your face. In a few of the photographs, you could even see the beginnings of a foot or face or hand floating in midair. The theory was that a spirit merely borrowed some living material from the medium for a short time; mediums claimed that the process of materialization was much like that of giving birth. In fact, the semiconscious medium would sometimes shout and groan, as if experiencing labor pains. Materializing séances were a big fad for a while, though modern mediums consider them a bit over the top. Still, as I hurtled down the highway that night, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had materialized Peter.

  I didn’t know how I could have. According to everything I’d read, ectoplasm is i
ncompatible with light, and the kind of fluorescent glare that illuminated the doughnut shop would surely have caused the stuff to snap like a rubber band back into my body. But who knew anymore? The world was inexplicable, full of strange machinery. Perhaps I had done it! And perhaps I could do it again. Hope clutched at me with her wet and desperate hands.

  Before I got to New Orleans, I passed through miles of Mississippi and Louisiana pine woods. The interstate was bounded on either side by trees as thick and even as hedges, and the land rolled gently up and down. Above, in the lightening sky, the stars winked out.

  Then trees gave way to swamp, and the highway, supported high above the water by concrete pillars, smoothed out. From the car I could see the tops of dead trees, large birds flying, and once in a while, someone’s house. A cold, skunky swamp smell blew in the car window when I opened it. The air was heavier here, and wetter. By the time I reached the city it was morning for real—rush hour—but it looked like dusk. Taillights glowed in the murky light that hung over the river. Now that I was here, I didn’t know what to do. It was too early to show up at Uncle Geoffrey’s, and anyway, once I got there what would I do?

  So I drove around. Cars honked at me for going too slowly, and I found myself getting shunted into the same one-way streets over and over. It wasn’t the city I remembered, but then, I didn’t expect that city. My memories were made of sidewalks and backyards and trips to the grocery store. Certain vistas were as familiar to me as if I’d seen them every day of my life—looking up Saint Charles toward the middle of town, or down Canal Street toward the river—but there were big glassy buildings where I didn’t think they belonged at all, and T-shirt shops on every corner. Some of them were already opened for the day. Maybe, I thought, they never closed. The air had a smoky, garlicky odor, like restaurants. It made me think of falling asleep in the backseat of the car when I was a little girl, coming home from somewhere, and waking up in the dark when the car stopped.