Blueprints of the Afterlife

bob hairdo like the ancient actress Louise Brooks (though Skinner didn’t know to make this comparison himself) and a vinyl catsuit adhered to her body. This woman, this sniper, his future wife, screamed motherfucker this and motherfucker that at the two surveillance techs and it was clear here that the deal with the calf, with the bleeding and the fractured tibia? That had been an accident. Whose accident it was was not immediately clear but Skinner, though in a great deal of woozy pain, just frankly didn’t feel in the mood to assign blame. Then he vomited and there was that to deal with, so long story short, Chiho hung up her sniper rifle and retired, visited Skinner at the hospital, and before you knew it they were watching comedies together and sharing pieces of cheesecake. Then the marrying part, the kids, Arizona, and now this. A ghost town.

I am the reptile brain, acting out my dumb violent shitty themes, Skinner thought, stepping over trash. He came to the house where he’d grown up and passed once more through the living room, muttering, “Please kill me now.” He climbed the steps and pushed open the door to his old bedroom. This time he found only a moldy place where, it appeared, pigeons had enjoyed some good times. Nothing furniture-wise but a dresser. The light-switch cover was shaped like a baseball mitt. Peeling wallpaper. He stepped across creaky floorboards to touch some artifacts collected on the dresser. A baseball signed by a long-forgotten minor leaguer, an empty DVD Amaray case. His hands gravitated to a smallish wooden box. He pulled back the lid. Well what do you know, it was still there. He’d forgotten about it: his first memory kit. Back then these things were only toys, the Apple console an ugly chunk of plastic. Skinner turned it over and found a card still inserted in its slot, a dormant childhood memory. It seemed almost too tidy to him, that he should find a memory waiting for him here, that perhaps the hidden motivation for his journey to Bramble Falls was the retrieval of a pivotal, forgotten event. Perhaps the card stored memories of the exquisitely horrific series of tortures and executions that had twisted him into a warrior for Christian America. Or maybe there were memories of his mother. He couldn’t engage the memory here. Too risky. Plug in a sequence of the killings he’d carried out as an adolescent and his brain was guaranteed to enter a permanently fucked-up zone. He needed Chiho or Carl to sit beside him and manually disengage him if the memory pulled him too deeply into the depths. He stashed the box in his backpack and left the house, half expecting it to go up in flames or crumble into kindling behind him. But it remained silent and inert, a hideout for squirrels.

Skinner mounted the marble steps of the library, lost in thought. He called out the names of the Vacunins upon entering but got no answer. When he entered the main reading room he thought he heard voices coming from the direction of Periodicals. As he rounded a shelf displaying magazines of long-expired topicality, the voices grew louder, more animal. In an instant, he saw the scholars, fornicating. Then, of course, there was the noise, the skin thwack of the man’s pelvis against the woman’s backside, providing a sort of percussive audio layer overlaid with their urgent grunts. This act they performed on a table piled with open tax ledgers, bound issues of regional magazines, topographical surveys, and the guest books of hotels. An open bottle of chardonnay tipped over and glugged its contents on volumes of city council meeting minutes. The Vacunins turned their heads simultaneously and regarded Skinner with slack-mouthed expressions that could have been surprise or simply a midcoital relaxation of facial muscles. Skinner sprinted from the building.

Outside, he leaned against the masonry to collect his breath, complicated somewhat by the fact that he was laughing. As his laughter mellowed into chuckles, he scrawled out a note on the back of a flyer for a long-ago concert, thanking the Vacunins for the wine. Bramble Falls had delivered what he’d come for. He figured he could make it beyond the narrow ridge tonight and set up camp in the woods. Only a few hours remained until sundown so he had to move. He pushed on out of town, up the switchbacks, through pines, the sun molten and rotten over the hills. He came to the narrow ridge and steadied himself with his walking stick, taking it slow. The emotional algorithm he’d been processing when he departed Seattle had lost some of its power over his thoughts. His own problems looked small, the cloning of his son more a curiosity than anything. Every few minutes his mind replayed the scene with the Vacunins and he laughed again. It was while laughing that his walking stick slid out of his hand. Bending to retrieve it, his feet slipped on the pebbly trail and he found himself momentarily suspended in the air. This state didn’t last long. He fell hard on his face. Then, though it took him a few second to understand this was happening, Skinner rolled and slid down the east side of the slope, his descent slowed a little by scrub pines that struggled to stay rooted in the grade. He swore, heard the gear jangling in his backpack, tasted blood on his lips, smelled dirt, and beheld the surfaces of the earth chopped up and spliced together, intercut with bursts of cloudless sky. Coming to rest in a dry gully full of smooth stones, he lost consciousness for long enough that when he woke he was shivering in darkness. He struggled to get to his feet but the lower half of his body wouldn’t cooperate. He slapped his thighs and felt nothing.

“This is some deep shit,” he said aloud. He managed to take off his backpack and unfold his thermal blanket, find his phone. No service. Next he found the first-aid kit and clicked the key fob Bionet transmitter. The little blue light took its time growing to full brightness. He turned his eyes to the night sky, hoping to spot one of those pinpricks of light moving in orbit. He pointed the device south to a section of the sky where he thought a Bionet satellite might hide out.

Within five minutes, the device spoke in a woman’s calm voice. “Welcome to the Bionet. What is your ailment?”

“Paralyzed from the waist down.”

“What is your hoped-for resolution?”

“I want to walk again,” Skinner said.

The transmitter appeared to ruminate on this, modemy scratching sounds issuing from within its plastic shell. After a minute or so, it said, “We’re sorry. We cannot complete your request at this time. Do you wish to report another ailment?”

“Full physical.”

More scratching, like there was a rodent in there working gears. After some time the device reported Skinner’s heart rate, blood pressure, endocrine levels, sperm count, and a variety of other vitals. It all sounded miraculously within the range of normal, but then again this was an old model of transmitter and these things were known to be buggy. He was just relieved to hear there was no internal bleeding. His body produced an ever-present corporeal throb. He asked the transmitter for painkillers and within moments his hands went numb.

“Chiho,” he blubbered futilely in the night.

Skinner pulled his body about fifteen feet to the base of a gnarled little tree and wrapped his thermal blanket tight around his shoulders. Focus, mofo. Comprehend the situation. He was trapped in this alpine divot, its sides too steep to scale even if both legs had been operational. Some sort of spinal injury had shut off the lights below his waist. The transmitter was really only good for menial diagnostics and over-the-counter wireless pharmaceutical dispensing. He figured he had enough food for three days. His phone might as well have been a rock. He could use his thermal to create a lean-to of sorts next to this little tree. He had guns.

The next morning clouds rolled in. Colder. It appeared he had pissed himself. He pulled his boots off, then his socks and pants and long johns. These legs were like dead sausages connected to the living meat of the rest of this body. Hard not to consider this as anything but distressing. He cursed into the transmitter, then was polite enough to receive another dose of painkiller. He plugged the tip of his penis into the opening of an empty water bottle and secured it with duct tape—a poor man’s catheter—then pulled on his other long johns and pants. The whole process left him exhausted and frustrated and sore. He requested and was denied more painkillers. He hurled the Bionet transmitter then crawled to retrieve it, spitting and cussing the whole way.

“Chiho!” he called, her name catching in his throat.

The sun passed behind clouds.

He gathered wood and built a small fire and watched sparks rise and disappear against the backdrop of stars. He faded in and out but the sky never seemed to get any darker or lighter. He remembered the man on the mesa with his refrigerator filled with beer, stacks of books, and stuffed animals. Maybe that place was some sort of Bardo, maybe he’d pass through it on his way to the afterlife. Crazy talk, Skinner. He tried to shake the thoughts out of his head. Because the one thing he wasn’t going to do down here in this gully was die. There’d be no check-in procedure with the great beyond. He was going to get out of here and get back to his wife and daughter and grandson.