Blueprints of the Afterlife

to ask you. We didn’t catch your name.”

Skinner introduced himself, a little skeeved out by the sudden affection.

“Ah, like B. F. Skinner, the great radical behaviorist,” Sal laughed.

“Look, thanks for the invitation, but—”

Rhonda said, “Oh, we insist on plying you with wine in exchange for stories of this mystifying hamlet. Do indulge us, please?”

“Wine, huh?”

“But of course,” Sal said. “And merriment as well! Ha! Come, come!”

Skinner followed the professors to the building that used to be the town library. He’d spent many hours here as a child, studying histories of wars and assassinations, lost in action-adventure novels. The building was small but stately, constructed of marble and brass by way of an overly generous grant. The inside was a one-room affair, with high windows letting in dust-filtered light. The Vacunins had been here for some time. In one corner of the room was a neatly made bed. On tables were spread maps, papers, manuscripts, a couple solar laptops, stacks of photographs. Most of the shelves were empty but here and there stood books that had miraculously escaped the ravages of looters and silverfish, every one of them over a century old. Beside the work tables rose a tower of several cases of wine. Rhonda uncorked a bottle, splashing some Baco noir into a glass that looked clean enough.

“Welcome to our humble domicile,” Sal said.

“How long have you folks been here?” Skinner asked.

“Four months? Five?” Sal said.

“Oh, Sal, we’ve been here over a year,” Rhonda said.

Sal laughed. “One loses track of time when engaged in the passions of the mind.”

“Not to mention passions of other sorts,” Rhonda stage-whispered. The two giggled.

“You said you’re writing a book?”

“Indeed,” Sal said. “Focusing on the events that transpired in these parts during the early years of the FUS.”

Skinner lifted the wine to his lips. “Holy—this is good wine! What is this?”

“Bramble Falls Vineyards, FUS 12,” Rhonda said. “You’ll find that the Vacunins only imbibe the finest libations.”

Skinner sat down on a creaky swivel chair. “I shouldn’t be drinking on an empty stomach.”

“Oh, dear man, say no more,” Rhonda said. “We were about to roast the most succulent lamb on the terrace. Do join us!”

Skinner remained sitting and pushed off with his feet, walking the wheeled chair out the back entrance of the library onto a tiled terrace overlooking the lake. A fire pit faintly smoked. Sal tossed on a few more logs and retrieved the cubed meat from a cooler, preparing it with spices and fleur de sel on an old book cart. Rhonda refilled Skinner’s glass.

“I remember this view,” Skinner said. “I used to spend time here, reading, watching the boats. That’s what the summary says anyway. I off-loaded those memories long ago.”

Sal shook his head like he didn’t understand.

“I got rid of them. Useless memories. Stuff that was just crowding my head. They’re not gone, they’re just stored externally. I know the keywords in case I want to experience them again.”

“And you remember the FUS?” Rhonda asked, startling Skinner with her forwardness.

“Sure. The first few years of it, anyway. There are gaps. We followed the news, watched what was happening in the cities.”

Sal slid the cubes of meat onto skewers and placed them on a rack that straddled the fire.

“According to the summary, after my folks died I did my best to empty the liquor cabinet and get the hell out of my own head any way I could. You could feel the panic setting in. We heard about the bombings and public executions, at least at first. It’s when the news stopped coming that we started really getting scared. Once in a while a refugee showed up at the docks in a boat, someone who’d escaped the worst of it. We did our best to incorporate them into the community but you know how it is with a stranger coming to town. Where are they from? What did they do? Who’s following them? Homicides, insanity… Christ, I’m boring you.”

“No, no,” Rhonda assured him, pouring more wine. “Tell us more.”

“After I buried my dad, I was drinking alone, passing out in my bedroom every night. It was a priest who slapped me to my senses and told me I needed to snap out of it. Father Dave. And by slapping me, I mean he literally slapped me. Came to my house, found me puking myself inside out, and hauled me up and whacked me across the face a couple times. According to the memories he told me there were was a band of bad men coming. He asked if I knew how to use a gun. We armed ourselves and fortified ourselves in the basement of the church… I remember off-loading certain memories. I remember disengaging from the console and looking at the card and knowing I had just deleted something awful. But the very memories of off-loading had traces of those horrible memories, so I had to erase the memory of erasing the memory. I remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory of erasing a memory. The original memory must have been something pretty bad.”

“You need another drink,” Sal said.

“I’ll take the whole bottle,” Skinner replied.

The next morning Skinner woke on a chaise lounge on the terrace, a half-full wine bottle still in his hand and several empty ones lying on the flagstones nearby. He dialed up a hangover remedy from the Bionet. When he managed to stumble into the library he found the couple fussing over their folios and notes. Rhonda wore a pair of white gloves and magnifying goggles and was nose-deep in what appeared to be an old phone book.

“We have something extraordinary to show you, Mr. Skinner,” Sal said. “Rhonda, shall we?”

Rhonda grinned. “To the morgue!”

“I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my life,” Skinner said, “but I don’t, ah—”

“Relax, Mr. Skinner, it’s not what you think,” Sal smiled, clapping the old man on the back.

The Vacunins gathered a number of seemingly random binders and papers before they all headed to the offices of the old Bramble Falls News. The door had been kicked off its hinges but set back more or less in place in the doorway. Sal moved it aside and beckoned the others into the front office, a clutter of desks and chairs in motey beams of sunlight. Something had made a nest in the couch in the waiting area. The news desks held dead Macintosh monitors, office supplies, and here and there mounds of pigeon dung. Then there was the paste-up area—light tables, a waxer, fax machine, copier, scattered X-Acto blades. Rhonda pointed out the darkroom, a walled-off closet with a cylindrical door. Down a couple creaky stairs they came to the storage room in the rear of the building, where collapsed shelves, busted furniture, and discolored spools of brittle paper suggested a raided tomb. A Formica lunch table occupied the center of the room beneath a dirty skylight. In the far corner was another walled-off room, a little larger than the darkroom. Sal dug in his pocket for the key and beckoned Skinner closer. He threw the door open dramatically and said, “My friend, I give you the morgue.”

Every issue the paper had ever published was preserved on shelves in bound, tabloid-sized volumes going back to 1890. Sal swept his flashlight over the bindings, each numbered by year. The few from the nineteenth century, most beyond salvageable, consisted of little more than brittle brown leaves on the verge of turning to dust. Rhonda noted that only 1899 was really all that readable with the equipment they had. Wearing her white gloves again, she removed that volume from its shelf and laid it on the table. They had photographed more than a hundred years of papers so far, Sal noted, but there was nothing like seeing and smelling actual newsprint spanked with moveable type. Skinner scanned the narrow columns crammed with minuscule words. Property disputes, a gigantic trout caught, a new store selling dry goods. Another losing season for the Bramble Falls baseball team. A barn fire. Marriages, wakes, births.

“Here,” Rhonda said, turning to a March edition. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”

Skinner squinted. A photograph of several dead Indians covered up to their necks in sheets, lined up on what appeared to be the bed of a wagon. Maybe four men and three women, it was hard to tell. A bundle that appeared to be a baby.

“The last members of their tribe,” Rhonda said, “Gunned down by three men from Bramble Falls as they tried to cross to Canada. Certain folks thought the Indians were putting hexes on the town.”

“Bramble Falls used to be part of the tribe’s traditional fishing grounds,” Sal added. “For a couple months this