I panicked. I was seeing the same room, but not through my eyes, through the back of my head.
This bar was empty, or nearly so. There was a man sitting on the end stool, facing the bar. Something was very wrong with his head. It was flattened at the top, as if it had been worn down to just an inch above his eyes. His handless arms ended in smooth stumps; his feet and ankles were gone, too.
There should have been a great deal of blood, but there was none, and somehow that made it worse. I wanted to squeeze my eyes closed, but I had no sense of my eyes, no sense of my body. I looked at the man on the stool, trying to understand what I was seeing. It looked like he’d been sanded away at the extremities.
I wanted to get the hell out of there. Every fiber of my being screamed
“Bunch of cheaters,” he muttered. Only his mouth moved—his cheeks remained perfectly still, his eyes stared dead at the mirrored bar, his pupils dilated to big black donuts.
He chuckled as if he’d just thought of something funny, but managed this chuckle without the hint of a smile.
“Forgot my pills,” he said. I could believe that. I had a hunch he had keeled over right there on that stool, dead of a heart attack. I was sure that was it; I was looking at the corpse, the soul, of a man who had died in that spot. That was the only explanation that made sense. He looked fused to that stool, as if he hadn’t moved in years.
The bar was otherwise empty as far as I could see. I couldn’t see or hear the people I’d just left; instead I heard a softly howling wind, as if I was on an open plain. And, I realized, I could see the wind, or at least see the distortion it caused—horizontal static, like the imperfections you see in old unrestored film. The color of the room was off—everything was muted sepia tones—and everything seemed flat, lacking depth. The bottles behind the bar stacked up back-to-front like cardboard cutouts, the planks of the wood floor tapering too quickly to thin lines at the far end of the bar. I had the sense that if the strange man at the bar ever reached for the bowl of Chex Mix sitting there, they would taste like rubbery nothing, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow them.
My vantage point lifted higher, then began to recede, toward the door. Grandpa was leaving. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to talk to the man at the bar who was slowly wearing away to nothing, who spoke like a ventriloquist’s dummy and seemed to be nothing but an empty shell.
Outside, a woman lay spread-eagled on the pavement, her face a concave blank from the nose up, her arms and legs trailing away to nothing above the joints.
“Those cookies smell delicious,” she said just as Grandpa turned the corner onto Cypress Street.
The dead were scattered along the wind-blown street. An old man with a beard leaned up against the wall outside a parking garage. A baby wailed flatly from inside a dumpster. A man and woman, both young, lay entwined in the middle of the street, repeating snippets of non sequiturs to each other like Dada poets.
If these were all of the dead, there weren’t many for a city this size. Most, I assumed, were inside. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like inside a hospital; the dead must be piled twenty deep in each room.
No—there was more to it than that. If I visited Grandpa’s studio I was sure I wouldn’t find him hunched over the drawing table, wearing away. His spirit, or ghost, or whatever these things lying in the street were—was inside me, not in his studio where it should be.
None of the dead I passed were dressed in out-of-date clothes, no men sporting 1940s fedoras, no flapper women.
We passed an undifferentiated pile of something, bigger than a dog turd, smaller than a terrier. It was slowly, inexorably blowing away.
All at once I realized what that pile was: a person. I thought of the man in the bar, the woman lying on the sidewalk, how they were wearing down. They would keep wearing down until they became piles, then, one day, the last of them would disappear on the wind. That’s why there were no men in fedoras.
I tried to get a sense of myself in this place, of my eyes moving, where my mouth was, but I was nothing in this place, an invisible observer peering from behind a window.
The street stretched, swirled as if I was viewing it through a black and white kaleidoscope. I felt a tug that was almost physical, followed by the familiar tingling in my hands and feet that told me I was coming back
Gilly was nowhere to be seen, probably driven off by Grandpa. Spinning from the four or five glasses of whiskey Grandpa had downed, I searched until I located the spot where Grandpa had parked, and headed home, haunted by images of the dead blowing away in that silent, empty world.
That was where Grandpa had come from. Or maybe more apt, had escaped from. One day I would go there. It might be a week, a year, or fifty years, but I would end up there in the end. The bald truth of it was like barbed wire pulled up my spine. It wasn’t an abstract, philosophical question any more—I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what happened when we died. It scared the shit out of me.
I tried calling Mick’s phone, but he didn’t answer. That was okay, because I wanted to talk to Summer first, in person. I wanted her to help me make sense of what I’d seen.
How had dead people gotten out of that place? I couldn’t imagine. And the voices—they were in there doing just what they did at first on the living side, blurting out bits of unconnected conversation, almost like they were emptying it all out for the last time. It reminded me of how people often say their lives flash before their eyes in the moment just before they thought they were going to die.
I pulled into the parking lot of Summer’s apartment, called to her as I got out of the car. I kept calling as I stumbled up the steps. The apartment door burst open and Summer came out, eyes wide.
“I was there. Everything he wrote is true,” I said. “Oh, shit. It’s all true.”
Summer shook with excitement, or maybe fear. “You saw it?”
Huffing, out of breath, I nodded. “I saw it. It was awful. So strange. I can’t tell you—” I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to collect myself.
Summer put her arm across my back, helped me sit on the steps. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re back now. You’re safe.” She wiped under one eye. “My God, it’s like you just walked on the moon. Bigger. I can’t believe it.”
“I can’t either.”
“I’m so scared.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
She turned to look at me closely. “Are you okay?”
There was a slight delay between when Summer’s lips moved and when her voice reached me. Everything seemed very far away. “No. Not even close.”
She put the back of her hand on my forehead. A heartbeat later I felt her cool skin there. It felt nice—soft, and real. “I think you’re in shock.” She touched my shoulder. “Come on, let’s go inside and you can lie down.”
That sounded good. I knew she wanted to hear everything, but right now I wanted to stop thinking about it.
CHAPTER 23
“What do you think happens to those people over there?”
Mick asked. He was still stunned, and sounded like a lost kid. When I told him what I’d seen he’d gone grey and begun to sweat. I thought he might be having another heart attack. Now he was working his way through a bottle of Drumquish single malt at his dining table.
“I think they blow away,” I said.
Summer was frantically flipping through Krishnapuma’s book. Now that we knew it was all true, his cryptic paragraphs were our map of the landscape. We’d gone round and round, piecing together what I’d seen, poring over Krishnapuma’s writings.
“So what do we do now?” Mick asked.
“I think we need to talk to some of the dead who are back. Try to figure out what happened to bring them
