The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  He groaned. “Of course you do. Is there anything you don’t save?”

  When we hung up, I took myself to Golden Hands for sanctuary, my uneasiness growing with every step closer to the little salon. I half expected Emerson to be there in miniature at the window, climbing up to his imaginary cave on the tabletop mountain, spying on Li and the others. I almost walked back out again, unsure if I was ready to face them. But before I could turn around, Li herself came forward and greeted me with a slight bow. Her strong fingers wrapped around my own and drew me insistently to one of the silk-covered benches.

  I didn’t know how to explain to her what had happened. I dug around in my purse and showed her the photo of Emerson in college that I had faxed to the police. By her somber expression I saw that she understood.

  “I thought warm feeling,” Li said.

  Wordlessly, with a sympathetic smile, she placed my hands inside a deep pottery bowl. She poured rosewater over them from a ceramic pitcher, the heavy gold cuff on her wrist shining regally in the low light. Because she had always tended to Emerson, her personal care was disconcerting to me, even more so when I saw Mei emerge from the back without a customer.

  With delicacy, Li dried my hands and smoothed them with a thick, sweet-smelling lotion. She ran her fingers through mine, working them back and forth to release the tension. Then she led me behind one of the bamboo screens and helped me to get undressed and settled on the padded massage table. There, with a gentleness that felt like sorrow, she applied her hands to the consolation of my exhausted body. She rubbed oils into my skin, easing the muscles, as she had always done for Emerson. Did I smell like him, I wondered, as my tears sank into the padded table—did I smell like the death side? Yet something about the movements of her hands banished such morbid thoughts as soon as they surfaced. The tender pressure, her careful attention, telegraphed to my body that it was alive. And more than that, it was alive in the field of a touch that approximated love. Was this what Emerson had felt? That human touch seemed to be healing more than my stiff muscles. It was as if a new spirit—a more lively substance—were overtaking me, entering my tissues and nerves and heart and brain as Li’s hands pressed and smoothed it all into place.

  In Emerson’s loft that evening, the breeze through the window was laced with the clean smell of detergent from the laundromat across the street. I lay for hours in my bed in the guest room, unable to persuade my body to give itself over to sleep. To exhaust myself, I got up and began moving the library of Easter Island back onto the shelves in Emerson’s bedroom, where I knew the books would be better protected from sunlight and dust. With none of Maria-Sylvana’s delicacy or flair, I cleared away some of the remaining tubes and syringes from one of the lower shelves, then wiped it clean and began lifting the heavy books back into place.

  It must have been an hour or so later when I sat down on Emerson’s bed to rest and then drifted off to sleep there, to the sound of traffic. Even now, I cannot be sure if the sensation came in the early morning or late at night, or if the time of its occurrence matters much. Try as I might, I could not see him or hear him, only sense him in a childish game of hide and seek, proud of his hiding place: one that was not to be found in the garage on Perry Street, or at the morgue, or at Golden Hands, but somewhere within my reach. Then I felt a twisting in my stomach, and I heard the roaring of an engine, about which I was not warned.

  20

  HOW DOES THE SOUL separate from the body? And if it is reanimated, by what mechanism does it move on to inhabit another form? These were questions I couldn’t answer, though I had journeyed to the realm of death. My stay as a child was so brief that I had obtained only a glimpse, and it was this glimpse that had left me searching, defining, cataloguing. Not just objects, but whole systems of belief. In time, I tried each one on for its beauty and fit. Like dresses, they were all alike to me in one way: not in form, but in essence. Different skins stretched over the same bones.

  Yet as I came to learn after Emerson’s death, there was an aspect of the subject that my inquiries had not taken into account. For at least one afterlife is decided by the living. It is the afterlife born of mourning. In this afterlife, the deceased is fused to the life of the griever, by day, by night, in thoughts and memories. The dead are carried off to work and play and home again. It is an afterlife named for the dead, but its duration and character are entirely reflective of the person who mourns.

  At the time, I did not understand the nature of grief, how it molds itself perfectly to the griever. Mine was the grief of Chinese nesting boxes: One coffin-shaped box turned out to contain another, with brass corners and matching locks. And each successive box unlocked the next, unlocked memories and emotions about other deaths over the years—distant relatives, a pet, some teachers, grandfathers, a grandmother. Until a box inside those unlocked, and I was grieving my former employer more deeply than all of them, grieving something to my core. I was pulled into a strange landscape then, a terrain I had never crossed. I trudged through it, finding nothing to orient myself by. And the paradox: I wasn’t alone. I was carrying the person I was grieving.

  I worked woodenly alongside Eric Dart’s crew as they handled the dispersal of Emerson’s photography collection, completing the necessary paperwork and watching silently every evening as a little bit more of him disappeared with each insured, boxed and couriered photograph that went out the door. I could not recall ever having so little enthusiasm for my job.

  It was a time of suspended animation. I had two apartments, but no sense of being at home anywhere; I had a good deal of work, but no employment. More than anything, I was chastened by the events of Emerson’s final weeks. He had berated me for wasting the life he couldn’t have, but his condemnation went beyond that. There were the comments in his notebook: I was a professional cloisterer, he said. I hid away. I could not deny it. I was hiding myself then.

  I set up a ladder to haul more of his books back into place on the higher shelves in his bedroom. As I worked, I wondered what Emerson would have been doing there in his loft, instead of me. He would not have been able to lift the books, that much was certain; some of them weighed nearly as much as he did in his final days. I restacked them one or two at a time for as long as I could, and once again promptly crashed on his bed. I could not even recall sitting down. The next morning, I told myself it had been an accident, passing out on his mattress for a second time, fully dressed. But again the following night, I fell easily into a restful sleep on his bed. So many of his books had been reshelved that I decided I would stay there to read and then move to my own bed in the guest room later, but I never did. From then on I slept in his room, unwilling to give up the peaceful oblivion that always came within moments of my surrender to the pillow.

  It was the old, irresistible force pulling at me, tempting me to give myself over to a merciful oblivion, where there were no feelings and nothing to think about. Awake, I felt what I lacked with unbearable immediacy—I lacked Emerson’s company, our closeness. Hélène’s observation taunted me: “So, wanting to bring someone back to life is not an impulse you are immune to after all.” She was right; I wanted nothing more. Not sick, not with him suffering. His illness and all those months of decline were already fading, like my ulcer, while Emerson himself was coming into clearer focus as the outline of a giant hole inside me. It was the feeling of having your breath taken away—except it did not stop.

  With the loss of Emerson came the hard echo of another loss that I could not identify. Awake, I contended with it like a kind of panic, hyperventilating some days with a brown bag over my head, enveloped by the comforting familiarity of paper. Asleep, I felt nothing, making it by far the preferable state. But I could not manage to keep myself submerged day and night. The nerves in my brain crackled with wakefulness, even as I prayed for more hours of nothingness.

  I lay there running my fingers over the non-childproof cap on Emerson’s bottle of sleeping pills—one of the few prescription bottles I had not dumped
out and refilled with his ashes in a fit of organizing obsession one afternoon. To me, it was a logical form of storage: The books that had once filled his mind with their contents had been replaced on the shelves by his pill bottles, and now the pill bottles held his remains. I felt this process of reduction needed a final step—a sense of completion—but until I could decide what that was, I filled the little orange cylinders and stacked them neatly in an empty corner on one of the shelves (though the amount of fine grit was surprisingly abundant, leading me to store the rest of the plastic bagful in his backpack, in place of his liquefied food).

  I considered the sleeping pills in my hand, considered my father’s question to me: What’s your game plan? What was I going to do with myself? The question raced through my mind as I shook the bottle—more than half full. More than a month’s worth of sleep, if taken in the proper dosage. Or, if taken all together, quite a different experience. I had hoped I could be squeezed into a slot, after all. I had tried . . .

  But as I lay down on Emerson’s bed, these morbid thoughts shrank back, as they had done under the coaxing of Li’s gentle hands. They were run off the road by a more insistent demand: Before I could consider any course of action for myself, I realized that I had a more immediate duty to Emerson to fulfill. His wish had been for me to release myself from my cloistered cell, but I did not possess a plot for that story. And if I did not have a plot of my own, I would carry on with his. Hadn’t I been shadowing him for years already? Taking him into myself, bit by bit? Wasn’t that what he had proposed on the night he disappeared? I intuited my first instructions then, knowing what to do as clearly as if Emerson were whispering into my ear.

  21

  SINCE I AM WRITING this account as Emerson’s archivist and my job exists in the service of him, I won’t dwell on my itinerary during that time except to say that, before October ended, I gave up the lease on my apartment in Chelsea and emptied it out—an achievement that was possible only because it appealed to my sense of order. Not knowing what to do with Emerson’s possessions gave me an unprecedented ability to part with my own. Like a prospector with a pan, I sifted through box after box of objects and papers. Stuffing my life with straw possessions was only a theory of existence, I now understood. It did not pan out in practice. So I reduced and cleared until I’d filled eighteen body-bag-sized trash liners with souvenirs and shredded paper, and then I stored what was left in the middle of Emerson’s loft along with my tax files. I got my hair cut, another remnant of my old self that was easy to part with, because I knew it would simplify things, and I made arrangements for a management company to watch over Emerson’s uninhabited loft while I embarked on something like the year abroad that I had not been able to afford on my college loans. Emerson had collected photographs of houses all over Europe, and they made convenient route markers. It was better than throwing darts at a map. Without a formal plan, I managed to see most of the homes in his photography collection. It was just as one of the women I met in Copenhagen, Anne-Mette, said later: I was never going to find a life for myself in those slabs of concrete. But visiting them kept me busy for nearly two years, until another Chinese box fell open and led me straight back to the Beacon.

  When I first set out, I discovered that not all of the houses from Emerson’s photograph collection were still standing, and not all of them were open to the public. Sometimes I could only view a piece of an exterior from a side road or a nearby hill. It was a fresh shock each time to see how a building had changed from the clean new images I’d memorized on Emerson’s walls. Some of the structures had become unstable and were long ago sentenced to demolition. Others had been altered so much that their renovation was the equivalent of plastic surgery, rendering them all but unrecognizable on the street.

  I was surprised to find that my recollections of Hélène were stubbornly persistent. It was hard to forget her when she had been so present in Emerson’s final months, and the more I tried to untangle what had happened between us, the more confused I felt. I made it a point while I was traveling to visit some of the obelisk monuments she had photographed when, I now understood, she had been unable to make any other artworks. The obelisks kept her in my thoughts, and I suppose I hoped to resolve my feelings about her through them, just as visiting the houses made me feel that Emerson was somehow with me, as if he could experience what I was seeing and doing.

  By my informal assessment, the ancient obelisks had fared better than the houses. The oldest of the stone monoliths had been erected thousands of years ago to honor Egyptian royalty who were, in the words of one inscription, given life forever. Heaven was a separate place, a yolk suspended in its own shell, and so the great needles of quarried stone, dedicated to the sun gods, were raised to pierce the sky. Each stood as a silent testament to the connection between the heavens and the earth. Like a dripping egg, the sun set, the sun rose. A soul died to the earth and was reborn. The obelisks had endured as emblems of this ancient hope.

  In my travels I met some of the voices in the cafés, and I found the beds at the top of the long flights of stairs to be welcoming. I wanted to believe I had put mourning behind me. Then, one day, the innermost Chinese box fell open, and I was forced to unpack its tangled contents.

  It happened in the summer of 1998, after I had gone to Helsinki to visit a home that the architect Alvar Aalto had designed and lived in with his wife, Aino. It was the first portrait on Emerson’s wall, and one of the few remaining for me to visit. In the photograph, the humble residence was little more than a stone path and a wooden door. In person, too, it was a relatively simple place to live and work, the kind of dwelling that might look joyless to anyone who did not understand that joy is not a home furnishing. From Helsinki, I flew to Copenhagen, eager to extend my time away, half consciously chasing Hélène’s shadow. Just as she had done herself as a young woman in that city, I rented a flat with afternoon sunshine—a luxury of a mere few hours on the darkest winter days. And when the time came to extend my tourist visa, the U.S. government cordially invited me to report to a Central Processing Center and put my fingerprints on file. It was a technician there, whose name I never learned—a woman who spoke lovely English, like all the Danes I’d met since my arrival—who unlocked the last Chinese box.

  I had been functioning until then with the help of my old, well-rehearsed imitations of normalcy: I’d learned my way around the city and spent my days going in and out of the furniture galleries on Bredgade or trawling the city’s vintage shops. Not much changed in the galleries from week to week, but some of the staff had become acquaintances of sorts, like Anne-Mette, who ran a little gallery off Istedgade with her sister Helle. Remembering how the home healthcare workers had brought brownies and cookies for me when I was stationed at Emerson’s loft, I sometimes brought the sisters little cakes from a bakery behind Strøget, and answered their exquisite English with small talk in my rudimentary Danish. I crisscrossed Rådhuspladsen—the town hall square—and walked from the record stores around Ny Østergade to the bookstores around Blågårds Plads that carried some English-language magazines and books. As far as anyone knew (and as I assured my parents in phone calls), I had a plan: I was preparing for a new career managing collections of modern furnishings. Except it wasn’t true. I was stalled there. Then I was called to the Central Processing Center.

  I chatted with the Danish technician as she pressed my fingers against the glass screen of a computerized scanner. She kept cleaning the glass with an ammonia solution and sighing. I watched her scan my hand half a dozen times before she finally declared the results to be inadequate.

  “What’s the problem?”

  She gestured to the screen. “You don’t have any fingerprints.”

  I didn’t think I heard her correctly.

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  She said it again. Quite clearly.

  I thought maybe she was joking, and said so.

  She shook her head.

  It was such an absurd pronouncem
ent that I responded automatically: “Everyone has fingerprints—if they have fingers. What are those right there?”

  I pointed to traces of fingerish marks on the screen.

  She pressed a key and magnified the faint gray scattering of hash marks. “Not usable. This one—the best one here—is less than ten percent recognition.”

  “Okay, then. I do have some fingerprints.”

  “No, you don’t. Each mark should be a clean loop, arch or whorl.”

  It was pretty the way she pronounced it: hawhørl.

  “By your government’s grade categories, these don’t even qualify as partial. Look at mine.”

  She pressed the button to scan her own hand, and I watched as a bunch of textbook-perfect flowers of human identity bloomed on the monitor.

  The contrast was instructive. Without exception, mine were barely distinct scratches, as if I had been tortured. They couldn’t have been more suspicious-looking if I had tried to destroy them intentionally.

  “How are yours so perfect?” I asked in dismay.

  “Because I don’t work for a living.” She laughed with delight at her own social-democratic joke.

  “Seriously,” I pleaded. “I’ve never been fingerprinted for anything before. Why are mine gone?”

  She shrugged, blissfully unconcerned by my distress.

  I said, “Everyone knows that when you get a little burn or a cut on your skin, they grow back in the same pattern. They teach you that in science class. Unless you destroy them with acid or something—which I haven’t.”

  “Sometimes they wear off,” she said. “Like the treads on a tire.”

  It occurred to me that I had gotten more manicures in a single year than most human beings did in a lifetime. Though I imagined that would have made my prints impeccable.

  “If I got my nails done a lot, would that strip the prints?”