Allie looked to the furniture around the room. “Exactly what makes this folding table ‘worthy of eternity’? “
“It must have been special to someone.”
“Or,” said Allie, “it just fell through a random vortex.” She held up one of Mary’s books. “You said that happens yourself.”
Mary sighed. “So I did.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you just contradict yourself? “
Still, Mary lost none of her poise. In fact, she rose to the challenge better than Allie expected.
“I see you’re smart enough to know there are no simple answers,” Mary said.
“It’s true that things sometimes do cross over by accident.”
“Right! And it’s not a blessing that we’re here, it’s an accident.”
“Even accidents have a divine purpose.”
“Then they wouldn’t be accidents, would they?”
“Believe what you want,” said Mary. “Eternity is what it is—you can’t change it. You’re here, and so you must make the best of it. I’d like to help you, if you’ll let me.”
“All right—but just answer me one question. Is there a way out of Everlost? “
Mary didn’t answer right away. For a moment Allie thought she might tell her something she had never written in any of her books. But instead, all she said was, “No. And in time you’ll know the truth of it for yourself.”
In just a few days, Allie, Nick, and Lief came to know all there was to know about life in Mary’s world. The daily routine was simple. The little kids played ball, tag, and jumped rope all day long in the plaza, and when it got dark, everyone gathered on the seventy-eighth floor to listen to stories the older kids told, or to play video games, or to watch the single TV that Mary had acquired. According to Meadow, there were kids out there who traveled the world searching for items that had crossed over, and they would trade them to Mary.
These kids were called “Finders.” One Finder had brought a TV, but it only played TV shows that had aired on the day it crossed over. The same ancient episodes of The Love Boat and Happy Days played every single day during prime time, and presumably would continue to play until the end of time. Strangely, there were some kids who watched it. Every day. Like clockwork.
Nick watched the TV for a few days, amazed at the old commercials and the news more than anything. Watching it was like stepping into a time machine, but even time travel gets dull when you’re constantly traveling to April 8, 1978.
Allie chose not to watch the TV She was already sensing something profoundly wrong with Mary’s little Queendom, although she couldn’t put her finger on it yet. It had to do with the way the little girls jumped rope, and the way the same kids would watch that awful TV every single day.
If Nick felt that anything was wrong, it was lost beneath everything that was right about Mary. The way she always thought of others before herself, the way she made the little kids all feel loved. The way she took an interest in him.
Mary always made a point of coming over to Nick and asking what he was up to, how he was feeling, what new things he “was thinking about. She spoke with him about a book she was working on, all about theories on why there were no seventeen-year-olds in Everlost, when everyone knew eighteen was the official age of adulthood.
“That’s not actually true,” Nick offered. “That’s voting age, but drinking age is twenty-one. In the Jewish religion, adulthood is thirteen, and I know for a fact there are fourteen-year-old Jewish kids here.”
“That still doesn’t explain why kids older than us aren’t admitted into Everlost.”
Admitted to Everlost, thought Nick. That sounded a lot better than Lost on the way to heaven. Her way of thinking was such a welcome relief from his own propensity toward gloom and doom. “Maybe,” suggested Nick, “it’s a very personal thing. Maybe it’s the moment you stop thinking of yourself as a kid.”
Vari, who was lingering at the door, snickered. He had snickered at every single comment Nick made.
“Vari, please,” Mary told him. “We value a free flow of ideas here.”
“Even the stupid ones?” Vari said.
Nick couldn’t really see why she kept Vari around. Sure, he had musical talent, but it didn’t make up for his attitude.
Mary took Nick to show him how her books were made. The sixty-seventh floor was the publishing room. There were thirty kids there, all sitting at school desks.
It looked like a classroom with kids practicing their penmanship.
“We’ve yet to find a printing press that’s crossed over,” she told him. “But that’s all right. They enjoy copying by hand.”
And sure enough, the kids in the publishing room seemed thrilled to do their work, like ancient scribes copying scriptures on parchment.
“They find comfort in the routine,” Mary said, and Nick accepted it, without giving it much thought.
Allie, on the other hand, had begun to understand the nature of the “routines” these children found comfort in. She grabbed Nick one day, during one of the times when he wasn’t following Mary around.
“I want you to watch this kid,” she told Nick. “Follow him with me.”
“What for?”
“You’ll see.”
Nick was reluctant, but it wasn’t like he had anything pressing to do, so he played along at whatever game Allie had up her sleeve. For Allie, it wasn’t a game, though. It was very serious business.
The boy, who was about seven, was on the plaza playing kickball with a dozen other kids.
“So what are we looking for?” Nick asked, growing impatient.
“Watch,” said Allie. “His team is going to lose. Nine to seven.”
Sure enough, the game ended when the score reached nine to seven.
“What are you telling me? You can tell the future.”
“Sort of,” Allie said. “I can when there is no future.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just follow him.”
Nick was intrigued now. Keeping their distance, they followed the boy into the lobby of Tower Two, where several other kids had gathered with a deck of cards to play go-fish.
Allie and Nick hid behind a pillar, but it didn’t seem to matter—these kids didn’t notice, or care that they were being watched.
“He’s going to ask for threes,” Allie said.
“Got any threes?” the kid asked the girl next to him.
“Go fish,” Allie whispered to Nick. “Got any sevens?”
“Go fish,” said the girl. “Got any sevens?”
Now Nick was a little bit freaked. “How do you know thus?”
“Because it’s the same. Every day. The same score in kickball, the same game of cards.”
“No way!”
“Watch,” said Allie. “In a second the kid we followed here is going to throw down his cards and accuse the little girl of cheating. Then he’s going to run out the third revolving door from the left.”
It happened just as Allie said.
It was the first time since arriving in Mary’s world that Nick felt uneasy.
“It’s like… it’s like…”
Allie finished the thought for him. “It’s like they’re ghosts.” Which, of course, they were. “You know how there are those ghost sightings – people say they see a ghost doing the same thing, in the same place, every day?”
Nick wasn’t willing to let it sit at that. He ran toward the boy before he reached the revolving door. “Hey!” Nick said to him. “Why did you leave the card game?”
“They were cheating!” he said.
“I dare you to go back.”
The boy looked at him with mild fear in his eyes. “No. I don’t want to.”
“But didn’t you play the same game yesterday?” Nick said. “Didn’t they cheat in the same way yesterday?”
“Yeah,” said the boy, like it was nothing. “So?”
The boy pushed through the revolving door and hu
rried off.
Allie came up beside Nick. “I joined their card game a few days ago. It threw them off, but the next day, they were back to the same old routine.”
“But it doesn’t make sense…”
“Yes it does,” said Allie. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. You know when you’re listening to music, and the CD starts to skip? Well it’s like our lives are CDs that started to skip on the very last note. We never got to the end, we’re just sort of stuck. And if we’re not careful, we start to fall into ruts, doing the same things over and over and over.”
“…Because there’s comfort in the routine,…” said Nick, echoing Mary’s words.
“Is that what’s going to happen to us?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“We are not like the living,” Mary writes in her book The First Hundred Years.
“We are beyond life. We are better than life. We don’t need to complicate our existence with a thousand meaningless activities, when one will do fine. Just as the world’s great artists learn the value of simplicity, so do we Afterlights learn to simplify. As time goes on, we fall into our perfect routine; our Niche in space and time, as consistent as the rising and falling of the sun.
This is normal and natural. Routine gives us comfort. It gives us purpose. It connects us to the rhythm of all things. One must feel a certain pity for Afterlights who never do find their niche.”
CHAPTER 9
Endless Loop
Nick spent the next few days following other Afterlights in Mary’s domain, and it confirmed what Allie had shown him. For these kids, each day had become a repetition of the same day—and although he wanted to ask Mary about it, he didn’t, because he knew she would find some way of giving it a wonderful, positive spin. He wanted to sit with it for a while and think about it himself without Mary’s input.
That didn’t stop him from spending as much time as he could with her, though.
Mary was not routine. Each day was different for her—the kids she spent time with, the things she did. It eased Nick’s mind to know that endless repetition was not an irresistible force. A person had choice in the matter, if they were strong enough.
It was a constant irritation to Nick that he and Mary could never have time alone. Wherever Mary ‘was, Vari was there, too, like her own personal valet. Or like a lap dog. Clinging to Mary kept the boy’s life from becoming repetitive, like the others—although Nick wished Vari would just lock himself in a room, and play endless Beethoven to the walls for a few hundred years.
“Do you always have to hang around her?” Nick asked him. “Don’t you ever want to do anything else?”
Vari shrugged. “I like what I do.” Then he studied Nick with a certain coldness in his eyes. “You’ve been spending lots of time with Mary,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for you to do something else.”
Nick couldn’t quite read Vari’s emotions, only that they were unpleasant ones.
“It’s a free spirit world – I can do what I want,” Nick said.
“She’ll grow tired of you,” said Vari. “She likes you because you’re new, but you won’t be new forever. Soon you’ll be just another Afterlight, and she won’t even remember your name. But I’ll still be here.”
Nick huffed at the suggestion. “She won’t forget my name.”
“Yes she will. Even you will.”
“What are you talking about? “
“Your clothes, and your chocolate-face might cross over with you, but your name doesn’t. Not really. It fades just like any other memory. Soon everyone’ll just call you Chocolate. Or Hershey.” Vari grinned, but it wasn’t a pleasant grin.
“Yeah, that’s it. You’ll be Hershey.”
“No I won’t. And I won’t forget my name.”
“Really,” said Vari. “Then what is your name?”
He was about to answer, when suddenly he drew a blank. It only lasted for a second, but a second was way too long to not remember your own name. It was a profoundly frightening moment. “Uh…Uh…Nick. My name is Nick.”
“Okay,” said Vari. And then he asked: “What’s your last name?”
Nick opened his mouth, but then closed it again and said nothing. Because he couldn’t remember.
When Mary arrived, she noticed the distressed look on Nick’s face immediately.
“Vari, have you been teasing our new friend?”
“We were just talking. If he thinks that’s teasing, that’s his problem.”
Mary just shook her head, and gave Vari a kiss on his curly blond hair. Vari threw Nick a gloating grin when she did.
“Will you escort me to the lobby? There’s a Finder waiting for me, and I suspect he has some interesting things to sell.”
Vari stepped forward.
“No, not you, Vari. You’ve seen Finders before, but I thought Nick might like to learn how to barter with them.”
Now it was Nick’s turn to gloat.
Once the elevator door closed, and Vari was out of sight, Nick put him out of mind, dismissing what he had said—not just about his name, but his certainty that Mary would tire of Nick. Vari, after all, was only nine years old. He was a little kid, feeling little-kid jealousy. Nothing more.
What Nick didn’t realize was that Vari had been nine for 146 years. Little-kid emotions do not sit well after a century and a half. If Nick had realized that, things might have gone differently.
Lief stood in the arcade, staring at the video-game screen, and didn’t dare blink. Move the stick right. Up. Left. Eat the big white ball. The little hairy things turn blue. Eat the hairy things until they start to blink. Then run away from them.
Lief had become a Pac-Man junkie.
There was no telling what caused the old Pac-Man game to cross over all those years ago. Mary had bought it from a Finder who specialized in tracking down electronics that had crossed. Electronics did not cross very often. True, over the years people loved their gramophones, or Victrolas, or 8-track players, or iPods, but in the end, no one “loved” those things with the kind of soulful devotion that would cause the device to cross into Everlost. No love was ever lost on a CD player that broke. It was simply replaced and the old one forgotten. For that reason, Everlost electronics were mostly the result of sunspot activity.
Mary prided herself on keeping current on technology, so that arriving Greensouls would feel somewhat at home. It had taken patience, and work, but over the years, Mary had gotten herself quite a collection of video games, and had turned the sixty-fourth floor into an arcade. There were also countless black vinyl record albums that had crossed, because people did truly love their music, but she had yet to track down a record player on which to play them.
Up. Left. Eat the big white ball. The hairy things turn blue. Eat the hairy things until they start to blink. Run away.
Over and over. The repetition wasn’t so much soothing to Lief as it was compulsive. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. Ever.
In the forest he had surely been a creature of habit. He had swung from the trees, playing his games alone—the same games day after day—but that was somehow different. There was no urgency to it. But the endless stimulation from this new-fangled machine demanded his focus in a way the forest never did. Other kids told him it was an old machine—but he didn’t care. The games were all new to him.
Up. Down. Left. Right. Eat. Run.
“Lief, what are you doing? How long have you been here?”
He was barely aware of Allie s voice. He didn’t even turn to look at her. “A while,” he told her. Up. Left. Down.
“I think you’ve been at that machine for five days straight.”
“So?”
“This is wrong. I’ve got to get you out of here! We’ve all got to get out of here!”
But Lief wasn’t listening anymore, because the funny little hairy things had turned blue.
It had been a long time since Greensouls had had such an effect on Mary. Lief was not a problem. He simply brough
t out in Mary the maternal feelings she had for all the children in her care, but Allie, with her incessant questions and her neurosis of hope, brought up feelings in Mary she would much rather have forgotten, and thought she had. Feelings of doubt, frustration, and a sense of remorse as deep as her towers were tall.
And then there was Nick. The feelings he brought out in her were of a different nature, but just as troubling. He was so very much alive. Everything from his anxieties to the flush of his face in her presence. His bodily memory of life was so charming, so enticing, Mary could spend every minute with him. That was dangerous. It was almost as dangerous as being envious of the living. There were whispered tales of Afterlights whose envy of the living had turned them into incubuses—souls helplessly, hopelessly attached to a living host. This was different, but still, it was a weakness, and she was not in a position to be weak. Too many Afterlights relied on her for strength. With all this on her mind, she found herself distracted, and uncharacteristically moody. And so, when no one was watching, not even Vari, she descended to the fifty-eighth floor, the place she went when she needed silence and solitude.
The fifty-eighth floor had no tenants on the day the towers crossed into eternity. For that reason there were no walls or partitions subdividing it, and so, with the exception of the elevator core, the entire floor was nearly an acre of hollow space.
And still Nick found her.
“One of the little kids said you might be here,” he said as he approached.
It surprised her that anyone knew where she went. But then, perhaps everyone did, but respected her enough not to disturb her. She watched as he drew nearer, his gentle glow visible in the daylight because the floor was so vast it was mostly in shadows, even with windows on all sides. He was clearly not comfortable with the space. “Why would you come here? It’s so… empty.”
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