Afterlife Read online

  She expected nothing remarkable for herself. It was enough to think of her brother roaming the north, making his mark, and becoming something different. Linda stayed the same—going to Mass in the morning with her mother, smiling all day at the fretful sick in Dr. Sandina’s waiting room, visiting her sisters in the evening, an old maid before she was twenty.

  Then, just after Easter, when the bludgeoning heat of the dry season had settled down in earnest, a letter arrived from California, the Spanish formal as high school: “I am coming to Mexico City with a friend. I will travel to Morelia to see you on Saturday the 8th of May.” Linda wasn’t visibly more excited than the others, who buzzed word of the visitation far and wide in the family. Beatriz Espinoza prevailed on the vinous local priest to say a Mass of special providence for the safe journey of her son. Black beans and guava jelly simmered on the stove all week.

  Even when he walked in the house, with his black brush mustache, she held back till the others had embraced him, sisters and aunts and neighbors. Then he picked out Linda with his eyes, standing beside the table where she sat and wrote her letters. They grinned in startled delight. She was brisk as a pony, her long black hair shivering. Her sisters were already wide as their mother, but Linda was spare and taut like him, with the same dreaming gaze. They were both too shy to embrace. Yet his grin was all the reassurance Linda needed.

  He spoke to everyone else all evening, the waves of cousins who came from everywhere to greet him. Linda oversaw the food and passed out the Carta Blanca. It was only very late that they were alone with the fireflies, having sent all the others rollicking home. They sat out on the terrace on chairs made of branches, the air swooning with night jasmine. He thanked her for all her letters and laughed with her about the dull-witted brothers-in-law. He’d already answered everything about himself three times over—his apartment, his truck, the border, the dollar. The only thing he could think to add was his gringo name. “Dell,” he told her, “with two L’s.”

  Linda leaned toward him in the dark, chin in one hand. “And who’s your friend?”

  He blinked once. “Marcus,” he said. “A professor. He comes to Merida to study the stones.” He waved a hand vaguely to the east, toward Yucatán.

  “He’s nice?”

  “Oh yes. Very nice.” He smiled broadly, the mirror of her own, then reached across and took her hand. “Look, you don’t want to live here. Why don’t you come to California?”

  She laughed deliciously then, as if he had guessed her deepest secret. “Why not,” she replied without a moment’s thought. Proving to herself at last that much was destined to happen to those who had no expectations.

  On Monday morning Steven hauled the Hefty bag out the kitchen door and down the driveway, grumbling under his breath, hating all the dailiness of things. He kicked the rolled newspaper out of his way as he headed for the two battered trash barrels, tilted against each other in the curbside grass. The barrels were supposed to be up behind the kitchen steps, brought to the curb Wednesday night for Thursday pickup, but ever since Victor had gotten sick, Steven had abandoned the protocols of trash.

  He reached for the rusty lid on the right-hand barrel, when suddenly a grizzled shape rose up, its lip curled and snarling. Steven yelped in terror, stumbling backward. The coyote bent to the ground again, where it had torn open a paper sack full of fast-food garbage. Steven sagged against his trash bag, gulping to get his breath back. The coyote, five feet away, seemed utterly indifferent as it shook a Styro burger box in its teeth.

  What disoriented Steven most was the animal’s lack of fear, no skulking away up the canyon as it had the night before. And what was it doing out in broad daylight anyway? Slowly Steven rose to his feet and began to back away. If the predators had lost all fear, the millennium was even closer than he thought. Then the animal came up off its haunches, ignoring Steven completely, perking up its ears as it listened to the wind. The ears did it: suddenly Steven saw it was a dog. Mangy and gaunt and yellow-gray as its wilder brother, but the ears were a lab’s. His matted coat and his bony rib cage showed how long he had lived outside.

  With a simian roar, Steven reached for a stick at the edge of the driveway. “Get the fuck out of here!” he bawled, smashing the lid of the barrel like a warped gong. His shouting grew wordless as he jumped up and down, banging the lid again and again. The dog looked over, head low, growling contemptuously.

  Steven hit the lid so hard his stick broke in two. He shrieked even louder: “Get out! Get out!” Across the street, where an A-frame perched on the side of the hill, the garage door began to rise, as if Steven’s screaming had tripped a sonic alarm. Then a moment later an old mint-green Caddy lumbered up the narrow street and turned neatly into the driveway. At last Steven stopped shouting. He was practically faint from exhaustion as he panted for breath. The dog hadn’t moved an inch.

  Out of the Cadillac stepped a wiry old lady in a tailored suit, a hat with a veil perched in her blue-white hair. “Morning, Mr. Shaw,” she called with a little wave. “Is that your dog?”

  “No,” said Steven emphatically, stepping away from the barrels to put some distance between him and the offending carnivore. “I never even saw him before.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him around,” said Mrs. Tulare, bending to peer in her mailbox. “I tried to feed him, but he won’t take food from me. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  “But I don’t want him,” Steven insisted as Mrs. Tulare disappeared into the A-frame.

  Now that Steven had stopped commanding, the dog loped away along the hill to look for heartier fare. Furiously Steven gathered the fast-food smithereens and shoved them into the barrel, dumping the Hefty in after them. He trotted up to the garage and got into the silver Volvo, dented at all four corners. It wasn’t till Steven was halfway down the hill, a pearly September smog brooding across the city, that he caught a whiff of rotten cole slaw on his hands.

  He felt a flutter of revulsion in his belly, and fought a memory of the smell of blood in the lab at Cedars. As he pulled into traffic on the Strip, heading east to Hollywood, he knew he couldn’t show up at the doctor’s stinking like a deli. Thus he decided, for the first time in months, to stop at the office on the way.

  Shaw Travel was at the corner of Sunset and Laurel, upstairs from a tux rental place and across from Greenblatt’s. The streetside windows, full of blue-velvet formal wear, looked like a Reno wedding chapel. Steven pulled around to the back of the building, where the parking space he hadn’t used in months was empty and waiting. In the dumpster beside the back door someone had tossed out a pair of mannequins, nude and headless and cut off at the waist.

  Steven trotted up the back stairs and used his key to let himself in. Instantly he could hear the buzz of activity, phones and terminals, though a dim-lit hallway separated him from the main office. He ducked through a door off the hall to his private office, about the size of a cabin on a freighter. The desk foamed with third-class mail that Margaret hadn’t bothered to cart to Steven’s house. On the wall above the desk was a big blowup of a silversword cactus on the black crater floor of Haleakala, eight thousand feet up on Maui.

  Steven slipped into the broom-closet bathroom to wash his hands, noting fussily that the last person to use the sink hadn’t wiped it for the next passenger. He tidied up assiduously and made a mental note that they had to change from bar soap to liquid: less germs.

  He would have slipped out the back door like a phantom, leaving no one at Shaw Travel any the wiser. But as he moved into the hallway, he came face to face with a young woman who gasped and jumped back. She stared at him as if he were a cat burglar. “Hello, I’m Steven Shaw,” he said mildly, offering one of his squeaky clean palms.

  “Oh,” she replied, the light dawning. “I’ve talked to you on the phone. I’m Heather.”

  They shook hands warmly, and then Steven had no choice. He turned and headed into the main office. The room was unpartitioned, with army-green metal furniture, a small bureaucr
acy in a country on the brink of war. Margaret looked up from her desk by the front windows, phone at her ear. Her eyes widened impishly at the sight of the ghost who hadn’t crossed the threshold in six months. At another desk Ray Lee crouched before his computer screen with savage punk-cut hair, spouting numbers at a fleshy middle-aged couple sitting opposite. Heather quickly returned to her own desk, apparently having thought better of taking her break just now.

  Steven nodded absently at his staff of three and moved automatically to the free desk in the corner. The computer was on and waiting. He pressed a sequence of keys, and the system booted up the client file. He had done this hundreds of times, but never quite so thoughtlessly. He would’ve sworn he wasn’t going to punch in Mark Inman’s name until he saw the green letters appear on the screen. The system thought for a moment, then went for the name: Mark Inman, 2200 Skyway, LA 90046.

  “We thought you’d never get here,” Margaret purred beside him, patting his belly.

  “I’m not here,” Steven corrected her. “I just came to use the facilities.”

  “You want to see his file?”

  “Whose file?” he asked with a certain stubbornness, even as she pointed to Mark’s name. “No thanks. I’m on my way to the doctor.”

  “For what?” No tension in her voice, no smothering worry.

  “Numbers,” he said, turning to go. Heather was huddled over her corporate rates. Ray Lee, darting past to grab some folders, murmured to Margaret and Steven: “They’re taking a second mortgage to go on the QE2.” Margaret followed Steven down the hall and out the back door. They stood together a moment on the landing, looking down at the pair of mannequin torsos tumbled in one another’s arms.

  “Lynn says Dell’s the most stimulating man she’s met in months,” declared Margaret.

  “She probably needs a new gardener.”

  “Listen, he really fired her up. Now she wants to get involved.” Margaret drew out the last word dryly and gave a languid shrug, which was her way of punctuating. She didn’t pretend to understand such things, she just reported them.

  “I hope she’s good with explosives.”

  “Oh, Lynn’s very game,” she countered. “Her whole life she’s been looking to meet a stranger on a train. If someone will just bump off her father, she stands to inherit Brentwood. Call as soon as you leave his office, okay?”

  Steven nodded dutifully, then trotted down the stairs. He glanced up at Margaret as he got in the car, smiling at her puckishly, feeling he’d been too abrupt. She leaned on the railing with folded arms, her hair glinting copper in the bright noon sun. She didn’t look worried at all, about Steven or anything else. If it was an act, Steven would have known by now. They had worked together for twelve years, since the days when Shaw Travel was a two-button phone in Steven’s apartment.

  Which made Margaret Kirkham thirty-five, though in Steven’s mind she remained as young as the day he met her, in much the same way that Victor stayed eighteen. Of the three it was only Steven who ever got older—exponentially so in the last two years, to him anyway. After driving up Hollywood Boulevard to Dr. Buckey’s office, he parked in an aimless gray garage, then sat for forty-five minutes in a packed waiting room, reading National Geographic, twice reaching into his pocket at the sound of other men’s beepers. The exhausted boy across from him was peppered with lesions all over his face. He wore a Cats T-shirt and Walkman earphones. Steven squirmed at his own girth, how it mocked the thin and ancient boy with the sleepy eyes, swaying to the silent music.

  Dr. Buckey, admitting Steven to the inner sanctum, did not specifically ask how he was feeling, the question being faintly out of place in a nuclear war. Beefy as a tenor himself, with fingers that never stopped flexing, Buckey opened Steven’s folder and drew out a sheet of blood work. He scanned it closely as Steven, sitting on the tissue-covered table, made a last futile stab at nonchalance.

  “Your T-4 is 289, Mr. Shaw,” Buckey observed pleasantly. “White blood count, 4400. You’re doing very nicely.”

  Steven flushed with accomplishment, the good student as ever. He didn’t even hear the next part. Wilted with relief, he pulled off his shirt and let Buckey poke at his lymph nodes and peer in his mouth for patches. The hard part was over. Somehow Steven had squeaked in under the wire again. No plummet and no red flags: he was stable.

  The T-cell test was a sort of latter-day College Board score, with the top of the class assured a slot in some immunological Ivy League. For a year and a half Steven’s numbers had bounced around from the mid two hundreds to high threes. When they were up, Dr. Buckey said he was doing fine; when they were down, he said the numbers didn’t mean very much. Other men had abandoned Leonard Buckey because he made it all seem like helpless guesswork. When Steven would ask about the latest drug-of-the-month, Dr. Buckey would say, “Well, there are people who say they do better on that.” And then he would flex his fingers.

  Actually, Steven liked Dr. Buckey because he had no bedside manner. It was a curious relief after Victor’s doctor, who had been so sure the answer was around the corner, if only Victor would just hold on. Steven preferred a helpless fatalist, even as he answered Buckey’s catechism: no night sweats, no fevers, no diarrhea.

  “If you don’t lose some weight, Mr. Shaw, you’ll be dead of a coronary before you ever get AIDS.”

  He patted Steven’s belly in the same way Margaret had. Steven was beginning to feel like Buddha. He didn’t retort that Buckey was just as overblown as he, because he knew this place wasn’t a democracy. As Buckey filled out the bill, Steven looked over at the shelf above the blood-pressure gauge, where a cluster of Plexiglas frames were full of pictures of Buckey’s wife and children. The dividing line between the two men could not have been more sharply drawn. And the prospect of a coronary suddenly seemed as lush as an oasis, like dying in your sleep at ninety.

  The bill was sixty-five dollars. As Steven handed his VISA to the receptionist, Buckey instructed him to come in again in three months. They shook hands philosophically, a certain understanding between them that nothing of a medical nature had just transpired. In December they would try to have the same non-meeting again, everything blissfully stable. Buckey called in the next patient, who happened to be the sleepy boy with the lesions. He came in bent like an old man, but what made Steven turn his face away was the yearning in the boy’s eyes. This one wanted to be healed. He still trusted that Dr. Buckey would find him a magic bullet.

  Steven passed guiltily through the waiting room, eyes straight ahead, not wanting to doom anyone else with his awful dose of reality. Tears welled up for Victor as he groped across the desert wastes of the parking garage. It wasn’t till the Volvo lurched out onto the boulevard that he permitted himself a small throb of being alive. He didn’t feel like murdering anybody in traffic. For the first time in weeks he felt he might make it home without a dozen glazed doughnuts from Winchell’s.

  To be sure, it was only the most provisional kind of alive. It wouldn’t have done to ask him where he’d be two years from now, because the answer was still “Dead.” But the stasis of his numbers gave the next three months a sort of burnish, like the light in Margaret Kirkham’s hair. He wasn’t going to be sick between now and Christmas. He never would have verbalized it so, especially to himself, not wanting to spoil his record as a fatalist. But for now, anyway, the white had gone out of his knuckles.

  At Hollywood and Fairfax, traffic slowed to a crawl around a broken-down sanitation truck. Its tattooed crew, up since dawn, sat on the rear bumper dozing like cats as they waited for a tow. Steven inched forward, patient and serene, opening the glove compartment to fetch himself a diet mint, just nine calories. Instead he pulled out the Thomas street guide, the spiral-bound Bible of the Southland grid. Back and forth from the brake to the gas, he moved toward the light at Fairfax. One hand on the wheel, he leafed through to the index, trying to act random, stopping at S. About halfway down the third column he spied Skyway Lane: 23, E-6. Quickly he thumbed to Ma
p 23, Hollywood and the hills. He traced the E longitude to Mulholland Drive, east of Laurel Canyon.

  So he lived up there, thought Steven, dispassionate as a realtor. Then on the map he spied “Skyway,” a squiggle off Mulholland on the spine of the mountains. The view would be out to the Valley, the opposite of Steven’s. A car behind him pounded its horn, and he looked up startled. The road ahead was clear. Steven lurched forward and took the turn, nodding guiltily at the sanitation crew as he passed.

  Four minutes later, heading uphill to his own aerie, he sucked the diet mint with innocent abandon. He swung onto his winding street and sailed the Volvo into the garage. Scrambling out, he paused at the top of the driveway, trying to think what to do first with the rest of his life. Down below, the 2 P.M. haze was pale as sherry, hunched across the city like a bad sleep. High up where Steven was, the sun beat unambiguously on the hills, scorching every vacant lot. Overhead a pair of hawks circled the canyon, their wings utterly still.

  Steven lifted up onto his toes like a diver. Wish small, as Victor always used to caution whenever a cake was lit for anyone’s birthday. With a lazy smile and nothing decided, Steven headed around to the front of the house. He went past the front steps and tramped through the ivy, ducking behind a white oleander. A couple of copper pipes with faucets stuck out from the house foundation.

  He opened both taps full force. There was a surge of pressure from under the house, then a sputter as several sprinklers began to spray. Steven hadn’t watered in months. The ivy and stunted shrubs that covered the hill below the house had done the best they could, brown and crumpled at every edge, holding out for the rainy season. Anything too possessed with being green was long gone in Steven’s yard. More than once, Dell had offered to hook up an automatic system with a timer, but Steven never pursued it. Let the desert reclaim itself, he decided grandly, wistful for the millennium.