Authors: Gita Nazareth
D
ead people doubt the finality of their own deaths. We either don’t believe it’s happened or we hope for some miracle to change it. We learn to accept it only gradually, at our own pace and on our own terms; but this creates confusion, because we extend the torn fragments of our lives into the open wound of the afterlife, grafting the two together. For sensitive souls—the souls of saints and poets who lived their lives in the knowledge that truth exists only in the spiritual world—the transition to Shemaya might seem perfectly seamless and immediate; but for the rest of us, including people like me, who placed their faith in logic and reason and what could be measured with instruments and seen with our own two eyes, the transition from life to death takes much longer. We resist, deny, and explain away our mortality at every turn. Thus, the very first thing we forget when we die is how it happened, or, more accurately, this is the very first thing we choose not to remember, because to remember such a momentous event is to concede the inconceivable.
The next morning, which was my first morning in Shemaya, I awoke to the smell of coffee and cinnamon. These were the aromas I’d become accustomed to on Saturday mornings during my life, and as far as I was concerned this was just another Saturday morning. Bo would get up early for a jog and bring breakfast home from the bakery, slipping quietly out of the house and returning with a bag full of sticky buns and other goodies. I loved him for this. While he was gone, it was my privilege and vice to linger in bed with my eyes closed, drowsy, warm, and contented beneath the covers. That morning in Shemaya, I lingered in bed just this way, in the blissful state on the border of sleep, unable to discern the meaning of the bizarre dreams about the train station, Luas, and my great-grandmother, trying to commit them to memory before they dissolved into the noise and distractions of a new day.
What was it she said that I wanted to remember...? I’d forgotten already. Dreams can be illusive that way.
The house was quiet, Sarah still asleep. The surreal images from the night and the possibilities of the day floated through my mind like fireflies and I chased after some and let others get away. It would be a beautiful autumn weekend. Friends had invited us on a hike up Tussey Mountain and later to an apple orchard for cider and a hayride; Sarah would fall asleep in her backpack to the rhythm of Bo’s steps; there were leaves to rake, floors to vacuum, and groceries to buy. And, I’d have to return to the office for a few hours on Sunday to work on my brief.
The thought of winning Alan Fleming’s case was the brightest firefly on the lawn of my mind and off I went. Lying there in bed, I considered the possibility that I might just be turning into a good lawyer after all—despite being a woman and a mother and having only one arm to carry a briefcase and shake hands. What a wonderful feeling to wake up to. I reanalyzed Regulation U and the cases in my mind and outlined the sub-arguments; I thought again about the hike and the hayride and breakfast, and chased away doubts about the fairness of my client keeping money that didn’t belong to him; by that time I realized I’d completely forgotten the dreams and Nana, and that it was time to get up and nurse Sarah.
I pushed back the covers and opened my eyes. There was blood everywhere, all over the sheets and my body; I screamed and jumped out of bed, banging my head against a post that didn’t belong in my bedroom—the white post of my mother’s canopy bed in my grandparents’ house in Delaware.
How clever,
I thought, rubbing my head and trying to calm myself down.
I’ve awakened from the second dream but not the first.
I went to the window facing the front of the house and peeked outside. Only a dream could explain what I saw. Half of my grandparents’ estate glowed golden, orange, and umber in the fading colors of autumn, while the other half shimmered in the fluorescent greens and pastels of spring. Sunflowers wilted and pumpkins ripened at one end of the garden as daffodils and tulips blossomed at the other. Red squirrels gathered acorns among robins searching for earthworms; two flocks of noisy Canada geese flew by overhead, one going south and the other north, separated by a dissonant zone in between where a fierce winter blizzard exhausted itself beneath a scorching August sun. I marveled at the merging seasons, struck by the enormity of their compression in space and time. It explained the hot and cold, wet and dry I’d experienced walking up to the house with Luas the night before; yet the more I stared into the continuum, the more it acquired the unfocussed
Wizard of Oz
quality of an illusion in two dimensions cast on a screen: the squirrels and geese made the same series of motions; leaves swayed in repeating patterns; squalls unleashed by the blizzard swirled in a constant velocity vortex.
Nana must have heard my scream; she entered the room without knocking, dressed in her pajamas and a flower print bathrobe. Through the hall window behind her, the faint gray shadows of dawn dissolved into a morning blue sky streaked orange with the rays of four different suns rising over the Brandywine Valley through the prism of four different seasons and merging into one brilliant fiery ball. It was beautiful.
“Are you ok, dear?” she asked with concern in her voice.
“It isn’t real,” I said calmly, pointing out the bedroom window. “It’s scripted and mechanical...a dream...like you.”
Nana opened the window, allowing the scents and temperatures of the four seasons to flood into the room in equal and opposite waves, canceling each other into one temperate climate.
“But it’s not a dream, dear,” she corrected me, dusting small mounds of yellow tree pollen and powdery white snow from the windowsill. “During your life you only dreamed of being awake.” She started making the bed, ignoring the fact that the sheets were soaked with blood. Pulling the comforter taut, she said: “Let’s go downstairs and have breakfast; I made carrot muffins just the way you like. We can go on that hike up Tussey Mountain later today. I know you were looking forward to it.”
I watched her, amused by the dream. “But it isn’t morning and I’m not awake yet,” I insisted. “If I were awake, you’d be gone, so I think we’d better change the subject.” Nana placed her hand on my arm—an old woman’s hand, wrinkled and rough against my skin; she was trying to convince me that I wasn’t dreaming; the effect was authentic, but I wasn’t impressed. “Dead people don’t talk to each other,” I said. “And they don’t have eyes to see each other or bodies to touch each other.”
She squeezed my arm. “That’s true, dear,” she said. “But it’s easier now for you to think of death that way. You aren’t ready yet to let go of life.”
“But I’m not dead,” I said, “look—”
I jumped up and down, doing a little jig in the bedroom and waving my arm around to prove it.
Nana indulged me with a smile. “You know,” she said, “I remember the shoe. Your mother shouldn’t have slapped you like that; I would have been scared too. I can’t imagine what she was thinking. Making a three year old kiss an old dead woman? Yuck.”
I looked at her in sheer horror. This was one of those nightmare moments just before waking when the thing you’ve been dreading is about to happen and you know you’re powerless to stop it—the moment that produces maximum terror, causing you to scream out in the middle of the night—which is exactly what I did. I ran down the stairs shouting “Nooooo!” at the top of my lungs. Through the kitchen and out the back door I ran, past the sink cluttered with baking dishes and the table with the plate of fresh carrot muffins. I stopped on the back porch and closed my eyes, hoping it would all go away; I even imagined reaching across the bed for Bo and finding his hip with his boxer shorts bunched up, and his legs, warm and downy, pulled up to his chest. I nuzzled close, contouring my body to his, the way a river conforms to the shape of its bank, defining itself by what it is not; his skin smelled masculine and strong and his whiskers thrilled my arm when it brushed his chin; I kissed him on the back of the neck and adjusted my breath to the gradual expansion and contraction of his chest. He stirred and smacked his lips softly. It must have been two or three in the morning because I swore I could hear the faint laughter of the college students who lived on our street returning home from their Friday night parties. But when I opened my eyes to see the clock on the dresser, I found myself still standing on Nana’s back porch in Delaware with the seasons—and my sanity—colliding.
“Bo! Bo!” I yelled.
“Brek, honey, it’s ok,” Nana called from the kitchen. “I’m right here.”
“Bo! Hold me! Hold me!”
But I couldn’t feel him anymore. I leaped from the porch and raced around the house, hoping a sudden burst of exertion would jar me awake. Through winter, summer, spring and fall I ran, past the oak with the tractor tire swing, around the herb garden simultaneously leafy and barren, through beds of tulips dripping with dew and chrysanthemums covered with snow. I tripped over the hump of a root surfacing through the soil beneath the white pine at the northern end of the house and landed face down on the soft needles, my robe spread out around me like the wings of a fallen dove. I stayed there for a moment, catching my breath, inhaling the sweet pine scent and searching for answers—logical, material answers.
What was happening to me? Why couldn’t I wake myself up?
It was the most terrifying dream I’d ever had.
I brushed the needles from my robe and looked around. The convulsing seasons had transformed the lawn into a paradise of climates—an entire year of days condensed into a single, dazzling moment of nature in rebellion against time. The apple tree I’d climbed as a child extended its limbs through all four seasons at once: some branches in blossom, some leafy, others tipped with ripe green apples and still others bare, like an unfinished painting. I reached from spring into winter, scooped up a handful of snow, and watched in amazement as the summer sun melted it into water that evaporated and began falling as rain on the other side of the lawn. Even more wondrous than this was the light produced by the coupling seasons: the rays of four suns, describing four distinct arcs across the sky, fusing into a shimmering aurora that passed through the objects it touched like an X-ray, exposing every darkness and allowing no possibility of shadow. The light was a feeling more than a physical phenomenon—a pervasive sentiment of brightness, uninhibited by the laws of physics and obedient only to the lawlessness of joyful emotion. I rose to my feet and twirled with my head back, dissolving into the light like my handful of snow, drinking in its warmth, allowing it to flush away my fears.
When I stopped spinning I saw my car, for the first time, parked behind the rhododendrons. The magical light retreated, taking with it the idea that this was all a dream, as if reason itself had been a passenger trapped in the car, waiting to be released by my glance. Hot and cold, night terrors, hallucinations.
A fever? Yes, of course. A fever would explain everything that had been happening to me!
I even remembered not feeling well on Friday and wondering whether I was catching a cold, that my skin had felt cool and damp. I gazed around the lawn again and up at the house; I looked down at my legs and feet and flexed my left hand. Everything was right where it was supposed to be, and everything worked as it was supposed to work. Only the seasons were out of place, and that surely could be the result of a fever.
I must have driven to my grandparents’ house in some sort of delirium and collapsed.
Nana was gone when I went back inside. The dishes in the sink were put away, the counter cleaned. A thin film of dust coated everything, as though it hadn’t been used in weeks. The oven was cool. Not even the aroma of the muffins lingered in the air.
I had made it all up after all. I really was at my grandparents’ house in Delaware.
I ran upstairs to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. There was my black hair, intact but disheveled, and ashen skin and bloodshot eyes. Carefully, I pulled open my robe. The holes in my chest and the red stains were gone. I laughed ruefully for having even looked. I took the mercury thermometer from the medicine cabinet and slipped it under my tongue: it read one hundred and six, confirming my self-diagnosis. I obviously needed to get to a doctor, but equally obvious:
I was alive
.
I went into my grandparents’ room and phoned home but got the answering machine: “Bo, it’s me,” I said, “are you there? Bo? I don’t know what’s happened...I think I’m really sick. I’ve got a fever and I guess I blacked out; I’m all the way down in Delaware at my grandparents’ house. I don’t know how I got here, I can’t remember anything after picking up Sarah at the daycare yesterday; oh, my God, I hope she’s all right. She’s not here with me, nobody’s here...I’m so sorry. She must be starving, there’s formula in the cupboard.... I don’t know whether to come home or try to see a doctor here.... I think I’m feeling a little better so maybe I’ll try to make it home and see how I do. I can always turn around. Ok...I’ll be there in a few hours. Give Sarah a kiss for me.... I love you. Bye.”
My clothes were piled beside the guest room bed—my black silk suit with formula stains—no blood—on the lapel and sleeve, my blouse, stockings, underwear, and shoes. I dressed quickly and left a note for my grandparents that I’d been there and would explain later.
T
he fall sun warmed the interior of my car, dry-roasting the confetti of autumn leaves on the hood even as budding trees and blooming crocuses swelled in the same sunlight at the opposite end of the driveway. Between them, a snowstorm melted into the sultry vapors of a midsummer day. I must have contracted some sort of rare tropical disease like Dengue fever. Whatever it was, it was better than being dead.
I inserted the key into the ignition and held my breath, still not certain my fever had broken and worried there might be more surprises in store. “Thank God!” I said aloud to myself when the engine roared to life. My car had always been my sanctuary, the one place in the world where, despite a missing arm, I was equal to everyone else and in control. I didn’t have special license plates, and I didn’t park in the special places close to stores, but my car was in all other respects a vehicle for the handicapped. My parents gave it to me for my high school graduation and Grandpa Cuttler made the necessary alterations himself in the tool shed behind his barn. He bolted a rotating aluminum knob to the steering wheel so I could turn it with one hand and moved the ignition switch and stereo to the left side of the column. Extenders on the shifter, wiper stalk, and heating controls enabled me to operate them with the stump of my right arm. I refused to wear a prosthesis, but I wasn’t ashamed to drive one. The day they surprised me with it was among the happiest days of my life, and theirs as well; the car purchased for me the independence I’d dreamed of and, for them, a penance for the sin of my disfigurement at such an early age.
I took a deep breath and nudged the shifter into gear. The car accelerated forward smoothly and I actually enjoyed negotiating my way through the seasons, blasting through the alternating bands of rain, slush, snow, and dry pavement. The drive from northern Wilmington to our home in Huntingdon took about three hours, arcing west along the Lincoln Highway through the flat farmlands of Lancaster County, then turning north at Harrisburg and crossing the Susquehanna River on Route 322, following the Juniata River Valley into the Allegheny Mountains. I tried to remember the trip down to Delaware from Huntingdon the night before—what I’d seen, what I’d been thinking, what I’d been listening to on the radio. I couldn’t recall anything. I’d always had an excellent memory: I remembered the first chapters of the novels I read as a teenager, and the holdings of the Supreme Court decisions I read as a law student; I remembered the lyrics to old TV theme songs and all the birthdays in my husband’s family to three degrees of consanguinity; but I couldn’t remember anything after picking up Sarah yesterday at the daycare and stopping by the convenience store on the way home.
The gas gauge indicated the tank was full when I left Delaware and it didn’t move the entire drive home. Strange, but no more so than anything else that had been happening to me. The trip was otherwise uneventful: the typical number of cars and trucks occupied the highway and did the typical things cars and trucks do; the landscape, sky, road signs, buildings, and billboards looked as they had always looked, except everything was wrapped in variegated bands of winter, summer, spring, and fall. The mountains crawled along the banks of the Juniata River like gigantic striped caterpillars, their deciduous forests alternately ablaze in reds, oranges, and yellows, snow covered and white, just budding and speckled green, and deep leafy jade. Gorgeous. Another pleasant but unexpected aspect of the drive was the serendipitous way the radio stations seemed to play the music I wanted to hear, when I wanted to hear it, without any DJs or commercial interruptions. All in all, things looked brighter for me with every mile, and I believed an end to my misery was near; but as I turned toward Huntingdon on Route 522, an anxious feeling overcame me that washed my optimism away. I began to worry about the nature of my illness and what it might mean.
Maybe I had a brain tumor?
I worried.
Or maybe my hallucination of being dead was a premonition of the real event to come?
Bellini women from my great-great-grandmother on down swore they were visited by an angel in the middle of the night to prepare them before somebody close was about to die. Was Nana Bellini that angel, coming to prepare me for my own death? Suddenly the possibility of a terminal illness was more unbearable than the possibility of already being dead. I imagined receiving the news from the doctor and falling to pieces, then telling Bo and holding Sarah close, knowing I wouldn’t see her grow up. Who would braid her hair, or make her Halloween costumes, or teach her to bake cookies? Who would introduce her to Louisa May Alcott and Harper Lee, or take her camping or to the ballet, or comfort her through puberty and adolescence? Who, but her own mother, could convince her that there’s nothing in life that she, as a girl, or a woman, couldn’t do? I was nearly hysterical by the time I turned down our street.
Bo’s car was parked in front of the house and I screeched to a stop and ran inside. Everything looked as I’d left it Friday morning, but no one was there. Bo’s cereal bowl with a puddle of milk in the bottom sat on the coffee table next to the unread back sections of the
New York Times
; bagel crumbs and empty jars of strained peaches and pears cluttered the kitchen counter; our black Labrador retriever, Macy’s, food bowl was half full, but she didn’t bark when I entered and was nowhere to be found; our bed was still unmade and the romper I’d decided not to dress Sarah in that day was still draped over the rail of her crib. I checked the garage and found the jogging stroller, so they couldn’t be out for a run. There was no note by the phone. The only message on the answering machine was the one I had left from my grandparents’ house. I called the Channel 10 studios but nobody answered the switchboard—worrisome, but not necessarily uncommon for a Saturday. There was no answer at either my mother’s or father’s, no answer at Bo’s parents either. I went back outside and looked around the house and in the garage. Nobody. The entire neighborhood was deserted.
We lived on a Lilliputian street in Huntingdon near Juniata College with small brick homes dwarfed by old sycamore trees shaped like giant broccoli. Having been born and raised in Brooklyn, Bo insisted on living in a town with a college; it was his only hope of transitioning from Manhattan to Appalachia. His dream was to be a reporter and news anchor in New York City, but the television stations there told him he needed small market experience before they would even consider looking at his audition tape. This disappointed and terrified him. He thought of small market television as a forsaken third world of vacuum tubes and static that existed somewhere between the Hudson River and the Hollywood Hills. Applying to Channel 10 in Altoona was my idea, actually; it was one of the stations I had grown up with on visits to my Cuttler grandparents’ farm in the fertile valley outside of State College, one of only two stations with VHF transmitters strong enough to reach the arrowhead antenna strapped to the brick chimney on their house in Warriors Mark. Channel 10 in Altoona was just about as small market as you could get. Central Pennsylvania is mostly dairy farms where the land is tillable and coal mines where the mountains rise up—still populated by black bears, white tail deer, elk, and more cattle than people. Schools and businesses there close for the first day of buck hunting season; and, in contrast to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, silos and coal tipples are the tallest manmade structures. When Bo got the job, I called Bill Gwynne, the lawyer in Huntingdon who had represented me and my family after the accident with my arm. Although Huntingdon was even deeper in the middle of nowhere than Altoona, Bill was considered one of the top trial lawyers in the state and he happened to need an associate. The timing and location seemed just right, almost destiny.
I heard music playing in the house next to ours and went over, hoping to find somebody who might have seen Bo and Sarah. Nobody answered the door when I knocked. I pounded on the front doors of all the houses on our street, some with frosted windows, the sidewalks in front covered with slush and snow, and others baking in the afternoon heat; nobody answered, and I started to get worried. I walked over to Washington Street. The hoagie shop and bookstore were open but empty—no customers or employees. The entire commercial district was strangely silent except for the occasional sound of passing cars and buses. Growing more frantic, I ran down the sidewalk past bicycles chained to parking meters and cars parked at the curb, looking in the doors of vacant shops and cafés for any sign of life. It made no sense. This was the busiest part of town on a Saturday in the fall. I eventually ran out to a line of cars queued at the stoplight to ask if anybody knew what was going on, but as I approached and peered inside the windows, I saw no drivers or passengers in any of them. Even so, when the light turned green, they revved their engines and proceeded on their way down the street in the normal flow of Saturday traffic. Astonishing—and creepy. I thought back over my drive from Delaware and realized that I’d passed hundreds of cars and trucks that stopped, turned, yielded, and accelerated, but I’d been so preoccupied with my thoughts of fever and death that I hadn’t noticed drivers or passengers in any of them.
A tormented howl suddenly shattered the eerie silence of the street. I looked around to see where it was coming from and discovered it was coming from
me
. It was the sound of madness. I made a wild dash through the cafés and shops, throwing things from tables and shelves, smashing dishes and glasses. I wanted someone, anyone, to come and restrain me. When no one appeared, I tore out into the middle of the street without looking, daring the cars to hit me. On cue, they screeched and smoked to a halt.
“Where is everybody?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Why won’t somebody help me?”
I climbed onto the roof of one of the cars to get a better view and watched in disbelief as traffic backed up in both directions through the changing seasons: some cars had their windows down, some up, wipers and lights on and off. Two police cruisers raced to the scene, red and blue lights flashing and sirens blaring but no officers emerged; the cruisers just pointed menacingly at me.
I broke down sobbing on the roof of the car. There was nothing left to do. I’d been frightened this badly only once before, as a child in the emergency room of Tyrone Hospital when the attendants laid me on a gurney and placed my severed forearm inside a lunch cooler beside me. I had been amazingly calm until that point; I believed my Grandpa Cuttler when he promised me in his pickup truck racing to the hospital that if I kept my eyes closed everything would be all right. But then they started wheeling me down the hall and I saw the anguish on his face and tears pouring down his cheeks; the gurney crashed through the swinging doors and deposited me into the nightmarish hell of an operating room. I was crazed with terror. They slashed away my clothes, stabbed needles into my wrist, and removed my severed arm from the cooler and held it up to the light like a wild game trophy. The arm didn’t seem real at first: the skin was slimy and dishwater gray, the white elbow bone protruding from the end like the plastic connector of a doll’s arm, tinged with smears of cow manure and blood, the fingers—my fingers—gnarled into a grotesque fist. I fought the nurses until they forced an anesthesia mask over my mouth and I lost consciousness.
Losing consciousness...howling on top of the idling car in the middle of gridlocked Washington Street, this was all I hoped for now, losing consciousness and awakening on the other side, in a hospital room where my mother and father would be there to hold me and tell me everything would be all right. But it wasn’t to be. I stayed on top of the car that first afternoon in Shemaya until the sun overhead divided back into four suns, each setting over the mountaintop at different points and different times, torching the sky into a blaze of pink and gold flames. Inconsolable, I crawled down and walked back home. The traffic jam cleared as the cars continued on their way to nowhere.
When I reached our house, I heard a voice.
“I’m sorry, child,” Nana Bellini said. She was sitting in the rocker on our front porch, enjoying the beautiful evening as though she’d just stopped by for dinner. I was certain now that I’d be locked up soon and sedated. I was obviously insane and dangerous. I talked to her while I waited to be taken away.
“How was your drive?” I said flatly, adopting her
everything’s normal and we’re all happy to be here
attitude.
“We’re not there, dear,” she said.
“We’re not where?”
“Do you remember when you were a little girl and your bedroom turned into a palace and knights rode beneath your windows on great white horses?”
“Who are you?”
“Remember, child? You pretended to lounge in long flowing gowns, dreaming of the prince in the next castle. You created a world within the world that had been created for you; you painted its skies, constructed its walls, and filled its spaces; like a tiny goddess, you caused a land to exist with nothing more than your mind; but as you grew older, you found the existing structures of time and space more convincing and put aside your own power to create in favor of the creations of others. The power to create wasn’t lost, Brek. It can never be lost. It’s natural at first for you to re-create the places that have been dear to you.”
“Where’s my husband and my daughter?” I demanded. “Where is everybody?”
Nana smiled—that patient, knowing smile of hers and Luas’, as if to say:
Yes, my great-granddaughter, reach now, reach for the answers.
“We’re not there anymore, child,” she said. “It was a wonderful illusion, but it’s gone; you’ve returned home. You won’t see them again until they come home too. Free will is absolute; we can’t direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm—”
She was scaring me again. “Leave me alone!” I shouted. I ran back down the walk toward my car.
“Wait, child,” she said. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t know where. I just knew I had to find Bo and Sarah. I had to get help. Maybe it wasn’t Saturday, maybe it was still Friday and I could pick Sarah up from daycare and start all over.
It’s all just a dream
, I kept telling myself,
just a bad dream; you have a fever and you’re sick
. I climbed into my car and started the engine. Nana called out to me: