Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 5
"I wish she would learn how to drive that thing," Tex said.
But this did not annoy Molly now. Because all of that—all of Everything—was beside the point. Way beside it. She fixed her left eye upon Tex and she hammered him with her attention until he was forced to return her stare, to snap into phase with her.
There was no more shucking and jiving. And Tex knew it—had known it all along—Molly now understood. He had just been, Bear-style, taking his time about coming around to this. But he was around to it now.
Tex looked at Molly and he gave her—out of nowhere—a funny little side-of-the-mouth smile. Just a jerky little thing.
"Woo boy," he said.
Somehow—you figure it out—this relieved her. She managed to smile back. She said, "So, what do we do now, King Farouk?"
Bad Cathy at the mike said, "Is it just me, folks, or do you think that song is really about frogs?"
"Of course it's about frogs," Tex said. "What an airhead."
And Molly figured there was no point, at this stage of the game, giving him a hard time about talking back to a radio.
ANGER, DENIAL, & SEQ
They sat on the built-in sofa in their living quarters, taking stock. (For starters, did the term living quarters still apply?) They lifted objects and put them down. They noticed, for possibly the first time ever, what a peculiar place the houseboat was—i.e., for adult human beings at the end of this millennium actually to call their home. Its decor fell somewhere between Hiawatha and Jimi Hendrix. There were
(3) framed Day-Glo posters, including (1) autographed
Peter Max
Stacks of LP's, still acquiring scratches from regular use
Shelves stuffed with New Directions paperbacks
(Patchen! Rexroth! The Lime Twig!)
A Sarah Nickerson hooked rug in a yellow-on-black
peace sign pattern
Painted parchment wall hangings and other souvenirs
of Katmandu
The Invisible Landscape, original 1975 edition
The Complete Marijuana Grower's Home Handbook
A steer skull from Jerome, Arizona
A bong
The Sri Yantra
The / Ching
A quilt made of old T-shirts too precious to throw away
None of which, if you want to know, provided any notable consolation.
Where Tex and Molly sat, the sofa's foam cushion was worn into channels by the familiar shapes of their bottoms. Goblin the Cat-Person lay curled in the space between them, where a tiny declivity marked his own settled-in spot. He seemed totally oblivious to their presence; but then, what else was new?
They tried to adjust, to accommodate themselves. They imagined there must be some protocol. Tex found his copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Molly picked up a hand-me-down paperback by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross she had not bothered with before now.
"None of this stuff seems to apply," said Tex. "I mean according to this, we're supposed to be, you know—on our way out of here."
He tossed the book onto the coffee table, a gnarled spruce burl sawed through the roots, upended, and rubbed shiny with bayberry wax one long-ago Samhain. The Book of the Dead touched down with a satisfyingly physical THOOMP.
"That's just Anger," Molly assured him. "Perfectly natural."
"I just can't believe it," Tex said.
"Ah. You're already on to Denial."
This phase persisted for several minutes. Molly considered Bargaining.
"Do you suppose if we..." she began, absently plucking Goblin's fur. "Nah, forget it."
What came next? Ah:
"What a bummer," said Tex.
"I hear you."
The Cat-Person mewed. Automatically Molly stroked him in the skinny part of the neck. Goblin purred. He raised his head a little.
"Nice kitty," said Molly.
"Hold on a minute," said Tex.
Afterlife Factoid #3
Death is no big deal to a cat-person.
"Well, what did you expect?" said Molly. She smiled, playing a game with Goblin's ears. She felt Acceptance coming along.
"You know what?" she said. "I think I might try going for a walk. Maybe just up to the Co-op or something. See what's new in the bargain bin."
Tex sighed. He propped his feet up on the coffee table. He said: "Ah, yes. The afterlife goes on."
THAT FAIR DISTANT SHORE
Poised at the Bee's gunwale, where a wooden gangway led up to the worn timber pier behind the chicken-processing plant, now closed-down and derelict, Molly paused. She turned like an actress preparing to deliver her exit line.
But what she said was, "Come to think of it, maybe not."
And she backed down from the gangway onto the deck.
"What?" said Tex. "Aren't you going?"
She shrugged. "I don't know, I just don't feel like it. I'm kind of afraid that..."
"That what?" Tex was irritated, mostly at not understanding.
Molly looked at him solemnly, silently calling for attention. Over the years she had developed a way of doing this, a certain intimacy-inducing manner of tilting her body forward, getting into Tex's space, while meanwhile making her eyes round and raising them to look up at him, ingenueishly. He continued to find this endearing.
"Suppose," she said, "I were to crumble into dust as soon as my feet touched the ground."
"What?"
She raised her chin, all dignity now. "It happens."
"It happens? How do you know? To who?"
"To people who have crossed the water and come to the Blessed Isles. You know, afterwards they can go back to the land of mortals, but only as long as they remain on their magical steeds. If they ever set foot on the ground—pfffi." She rubbed her finger and thumb together, watching the imaginary dust drift down.
Tex could not believe this. He determined to be reasonable. "Those are fairy tales," he said. "They're just stories."
"Just stories? Where do you think everything we know comes from? If people had honored the old stories more, we wouldn't—I mean, they wouldn't—be in such a mess today."
"But Raven. Listen. We did not cross the water and come to the Blessed Isles. We drove up a dirt road and fell in a well. In Maine."
"Ha!" Molly gestured with full dramatic vigor, though Tex suspected it was a smoke screen. "We crossed that little creek, didn't we? Where the snow had melted and made a gully in the road? And everyone knows that wells are entrances to the Otherworld. That's why people throw pennies in them—it's a folk memory, seeking the favor of the gods and so forth. Didn't you know?"
Tex felt dizzy for a moment. Something blurry came about halfway back to him. Pennies in a well. He had seen that, somewhere. And something else. A figurine. A plastic doll. He shuddered. Too weird.
"I don't believe it," he said. "I mean, if we're dead, we're dead. That's cool. That's the end of the story. There's no way we could get any deader. Crumble into dust—what does that mean?" He hoisted himself onto the gangway.
"But it can't be the end," Molly said (so weakly, though, that he didn't quite register it). "Otherwise..."
Tex said, "Look, if you're not going ashore, then I am. I'll just stroll up to the Fleet Bank and—hey, dig this—I'll see if I can sneak some money out of a drawer. Just to check," he added quickly, seeing Molly's disapproving gaze about to fall on him. "Anyway, I'll be right back. Then you'll see."
He took a step up the gangway. Another step. So far so good. More confidently now, he pulled on the safety ropes and forged ahead with a swagger, reaching the end of the plank in half a dozen steps. With a little flourishy wave back at Molly, he set his right leg on the thick old timber of the pier
and fell down screaming
in unbelievable
agony.
"Bear!" Molly cried. She came scrambling up the gangway after him. "What happened?"
"I broke a leg," he groaned, twisting from side to side. "You told everybody to, remember?"
His right leg flopped uselessly, making a zig and then a zag in very unnatural directions. Molly felt slightly nauseous but also fascinated.
"How did you do that?" she said. "How could it possibly have happened? In the Well, do you think?"
"A goddess kissed me," he said—harshly, not sure altogether what he meant by it.
"She did?" whispered Molly. As though she had known there must be more to the story. "When? What goddess?"
"I don't know." Tex paused in his writhing about to look up plaintively at her. "Could you help me back on board? Please?"
"Oh. I'm sorry." She reached down—being very careful not to touch the pier—and grabbed Tex by his up-stretched hands. He was a scrawny thing, not much to lug around. With a couple of heaves she got him back on the gangway. She paused for a breath.
Tex felt his pain evaporate. He looked down and saw that his leg was miraculously mended: straight and solid like always. Cautiously he flexed it, pressed downward . Against the plank. Ninguna problema.
"I'll be damned," he said.
"I hope not," Molly said sweetly. And she turned and sashayed back to the living quarters without so much as a told-you-so.
"Women," Tex said to a visiting seagull. "Women and goddesses."
The seagull cocked its (his? her?) head sideways and looked down superciliously. But then, a seagull would.
KNOWING IT ALL
"Maybe we're not supposed to leave the boat," Tex said. Thinking aloud, mostly. "Maybe this is where we have to stay. Forever, I mean. Maybe we're ghosts, and we've got to hang out and haunt the Bee."
"I don't think so," said Molly. Tex looked up at her, moderately annoyed. She was watering her royal purple streptocarpus. "I think it's more like a riddle we have to figure out," she said, without looking around at him. "Like a puzzle, a labyrinth, whatever. That's how the gods communicate with humans, generally. Plus, it's a characteristic feature of visits to the Otherworld."
"What do you mean, visits!" Tex said. It came out sounding less sarcastic and more like a real question than he had intended. "And how did you get to be such a know-it-all, anyway?"
Molly spritzed a rosemary topiary with the pretty copper mister she had found at the dump. She guessed somebody had thrown it away when the green patina started to spread on it, like lichen. Turning, she gave Tex a playful spritz as well. She didn't figure a little water would do him any harm.
"I guess it must have been something I ate," she said.
"What?" Tex raised a pillow to defend himself.
"Something I ate." Molly paused, thinking over what she had said. "That's odd."
Tex lowered the pillow, cautiously.
Molly spritzed him again.
"Stop it, Raven."
"Ask me something," she said.
"I am asking you something. I'm asking you to stop squirting me."
"No, I mean ... ask me something real. A question. Something you really want to know."
Tex got it that she was serious now. "Okay." He reached into his patchwork Spindleworks vest and pulled out an acorn. He rolled it between his fingers: brown, egg-shaped, thickly capped. "What I really want to know is, how did this acorn get in my pocket?"
Molly took it from him. As soon as she touched it she said, "That's easy. You picked it up in the dark last night, thinking it was your bone pendant."
Tex opened his eyes, feeling something like panic. "My bone pendant! Holy shit! I've lost it!" He patted his vest pockets, but there was no doubt about it. He looked up at Molly in dismay. "So where's the pendant, then?"
"Ah," she said. "Good question."
She narrowed her eyes in an effort to ... what? To remember? To intuit, to dowse, to scry? Whatever it was, the effort made her feel woozy. She sat down on the sofa next to Tex and she closed her eyes.
To see, she realized. She was trying to see.
Okay, she thought. Addressing herself as though to a person, a Being, hanging around somewhere, just waiting for this. She thought: Listen up, now.
"Ask me again," she told Tex.
And from somewhere, outside, in the distance, she heard his voice say
(Where's my pendant?)
and she felt Time begin to change direction, to spiral around her. Presently a great blackness began to grow, to swell from within, like a photo-negative universe, filling the space in Molly's brain where she was accustomed to forming images with her right eye, the one that was good at distances. And in the middle of the blackness was a single mote of light, way far off but painfully bright even so. She did not want to look any longer at this but she understood that she must. So when the light spiraled inward closer and closer Molly struggled against the urge to turn away, and the pain ripped down her optic nerve hke a claw tearing its way into her eyeball. And then very suddenly
she was through it
and out again
on the Other Side.
She saw it clearly—and heard and smelled and felt it again, too: a land where furry creatures roam and blankets of moss lie on ancient boulders and mighty trees thrust their limbs a hundred feet and higher into the sky. Where music throbs down the highways and whispers in the ears of nursing mothers and floats from the drop-tile ceilings of supermarkets. Where water gurgles secretly in woodland streams, in sewer pipes, in the ABS tubing of irrigation lines. Where energy hums in wires. Conversations fly and bounce within light-waves. Colors rain like tiny droplets onto phosphorescent glass. Where children play and firearms pop and there is danger at every breath;
where the sky is melting and the seas are bursting their bounds;
where eagles soar with quicksilver tarnishing their blood;
and where the Worm that gnaws at the heart of the Rose has evolved resistance to the incantations long used to banish him.
And Molly dared not blink, because the vision was marvelous though it was also terrifying. And she knew that she had returned
if only in spirit
with only her one good eye
to the enchanted land
that was called
Life.
there was time.
* * *
Plenty of time: It was just past 8 o'clock and there was no need to hurry to the office, so Eugene Deere, Ph.D. (Bot.), decided to get his 20 minutes of cardiovascular ya-yas by hiking up the logging trail into the forest near his rented bungalow. This was a good time of year for identifying native plants—deciduous forbs, now starting to leaf out, as well as the smaller evergreens that had been until very recently concealed by a lingering snow cover. He slammed the heavy ash-wood door of the house and had to remind himself (for it was not yet a matter of habit) to leave the door unlocked. After all, this was rural Maine. The Great North Woods. And there was no sense taking a job way out in the toolies like this if you were going to keep glancing over your shoulder all the time like folks back home in the heart of Civilization.
Keys clinking in his pocket, Gene set off down the driveway—could you call it a driveway? parallel groves mashed into the mud by his oversized radials—whistling a little snatch of the Handel piece they had been playing on "Classical Morning."
The morning was fine: sunny and cool, sky deep blue, with a few cumulus puffs crossing the mountains at high velocity. But was it typical! Gene had only lived up here since last July, when the position at Goddin opened up. This, then, was his first spring. Locals had told him winter was not what it used to be. They remarked upon this with an odd lack of emotional inflection—neither grateful for relief from the god-awful cold, nor worried by the possible connection to global climate change—as in fact, now that Gene came to think of it, they remarked upon most everything.
Passing his dun-brown Range Rover, Gene gave the hood an affectionate pat. He glanced down at the vanity tags, a late-winter whim. GRN GENE, they said.
«Oh, come on» thought Molly. «Who is this guy?» She felt as though she were floating—just a presence, bodiless: a mere point of view—just behind Gene's right shoulder. And yet she seemed also to be inside his head, effortlessly surfing his thought-waves. Too weird. But definitely worth hanging on to, just for the ride.
At the end of the driveway Gene noticed a second, noncompatible set of tread marks. For an instant, a whimsical thought flitted through his mind. Somebody's been sleeping in my bed, it said, in the mock-ferocious voice of a cartoon bear.
Gene allowed himself a smile. Frivolous thoughts were not entirely unfamiliar to him. He was a normal person, after all. Still, the mental sidestep made him uncomfortable, as did many day-to-day workings of the human brain. Gene was beginning to entertain serious doubts about the mind-as-self-organizing-neural-network model, currently in vogue among cognitive science types. But this was no time to get into that. He glanced at his khaki-strapped L. L. Bean field watch and strode briskly onto the roadway. Half a mile in, half a mile out, then on with the day's itinerary. Less than a dozen strides in front of him, tilting measurably as its passenger-side wheels sank into the oozy shoulder, an old Saab hunkered down on its ruined suspension. Mid-70's Model 99, Gene judged. The car's advanced state of oxidation was partly masked by the baked sienna color that its paint had, presumably, once been. Its decrepit rear end looked as though it might owe much of its structural integrity to a generous bandaging of bumper stickers:
SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM
AS FAST AS A SPEEDING OAK
DOING MY BIT TO PISS OFF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT
DON'T BLAME ME—I VOTED FOR ELVIS
POG MO THOIN
QUESTION MICROSOFT
Gene chuckled: he liked the one about the religious right. He approached the Saab cautiously, half expecting some unmedicated Nam-vet psychopath to come lunging out at him; but it appeared that the old car was empty. (Empty, that is, except for an amazing backseat's worth of old clothes and cardboard boxes and . . . could that be an actual bear pelt?) Gene passed the Saab in a museum-syle sideways shuffle, marveling at this anthropological showpiece. Somewhat reluctantly he crossed the road, walked past the tree where a sign had until recently declared strictly prohibited, and stepped into the damp and shadowy forest.
