The Afterlives Read online

  ALSO BY THOMAS PIERCE

  The Hall of Small Mammals

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Pierce

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698144941

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pierce, Thomas, date.

  Title: The afterlives : a novel / Thomas Pierce.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017004108 | ISBN 9781594632532 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Spouses—Fiction. | Future life—Fiction. | Time travel—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Ghost. | GSAFD: Ghost stories. | Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.I3595 A38 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004108

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR MY FRIEND

  CHARLES THOMAS

  Also by Thomas Pierce

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  • I •

  MISFIRE

  • II •

  A PARTIAL EXISTENCE

  • III •

  GRAMMERS

  • IV •

  THE REUNION MACHINE

  • V •

  SUBJECT 42

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The dog is on fire! She rips the cloth off the dining room table and chases him into the kitchen, but the dog slams into the cabinet, rattling all the china, and collapses on the floor at her feet, all his fur burned away. Her poor dog! How on earth did this happen? Her little dog is dead, and all she can do is scream for help.

  •I•

  MISFIRE

  Exit heartbeat.

  Exit breath.

  Exit every mood, every memory.

  Exit you.

  To where?

  First, their voices—the nurse’s, the doctor’s, my parents’.

  “He looks so puffy,” I could hear my mother saying. “Is it normal he looks so puffy?”

  I was a rabbit pulled from the black hole of a magician’s top hat. The doctor pointed to the television on the opposite wall and asked me if I knew what it was for. I thought he was joking. Next he asked me for my full name. This question frightened me more than it probably should have. I was Jim Byrd, wasn’t I? Didn’t he know I was Jim Byrd?

  My chest was incredibly sore and bruised. Days would pass before I’d recall my collapse in the parking garage down the street from my office. A gash in my forehead had already been sutured. One of the nurses, a young girl with henna tattoos all over her hands and wrists, explained that the gentleman who’d discovered me at the base of the stairs leading up to P2 had administered CPR until the paramedics arrived with their defibrillators.

  “If not for him,” she said, “you’d probably still be dead.”

  “Dead?”

  The nurse blushed. To have mentioned the fact of my death, I gathered, had been a slipup. She backtracked: Not an actual death, more like a figurative one, or, rather, a technical one. An almost-death.

  Sudden cardiac arrest was the diagnosis. I had a long history of passing out, though until now I’d always understood these episodes to be a symptom of a simple fainting disorder. Childhood doctors had advised me to eat more to keep up my blood pressure. But new tests revealed my true condition, which amounted to a vast electrical problem in my body.

  A misfire, my cardiologist called it.

  “But was I really dead?”

  “Clinically.”

  Dying, he clarified, was a process, not a single event. It was like a wave pulling back from the shore, the sand shifting color, dark to light, as the water leached out of it. Even where the sand appeared dry, sometimes you could dig down a few inches and find more water. You died, and then you died a little more, and then just a little bit more until you were all the way completely dead—or not, depending.

  “For how long was I?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s difficult to say. Given that you seem to have suffered no brain damage, I’m guessing not more than five minutes. You’re very lucky.”

  “I saw nothing,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “While I was dead. I saw nothing. No lights, no tunnels, no angels. I was just gone. I don’t remember anything.”

  The doctor arched his eyebrows but was silent.

  “What does that indicate to you?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

  “Read too much into it?”

  “I wouldn’t give it too much thought, is what I mean. Look on the bright side. You’re back. You’re only thirty-three. Still a young man. You have more life ahead of you, Mr. Byrd.”

  To help guarantee this, he recommended that I have a device installed in my chest that would regulate this electrical problem, and soon thereafter I became one of the earliest recipients of a HeartNet, a very advanced implantable defibrillator that looks a little bit like a small onion bag only with tighter mesh. The bag wraps tightly around the heart, squeezing it, fusing with it. Located at its top is a little shrunken head—a node, its brain. I’m told it’s practically an artificial intelligence, that’s how smart this technology is. If never powered down, HeartNet will keep my heart beating for as long as its battery allows. About two hundred years, apparently. Due to the longevity of its batteries, the device has actually created confusion in some cases. I understand that there’ve been instances where HeartNet has failed to recognize that a body has already given up on itself and so continued pumping blood, undeterred. Hospitals have been forced to store bodies in their morgues with still-beating hearts.

  My HeartNet is in constant communication with its manufacturer in Sheldrick, California, and I have the ability to monitor the diagnostics it provides in real time on my phone. A few taps on the screen, and an image of my own heart appears there, pumping and quaking. Blood flow through the four chambers is mapped as a staticky blue and red, outtake and intake. Beats per minute, electrocardiographic charts, echocardiographs, blood pool scans. It’s all there at my fingertips. If you select a certain option, the device will even alert you every time it saves your life—which is to say, every time your heart fails to beat properly of its own accord.

  I experienced this for the first time about two weeks after the procedure. I wasn’t running or lifting weights or having sex. I wasn’t involved in any sort of strenuous activity whatsoever. I was simply sitting on the couch watching television. Receiving the alert—three delicate chimes, like a call to meditation in a Buddhist temple—I immediately shut off the TV and dressed.

  I was wasting my life!

  I desperately needed to be out of the house—but where to go? I wasn’t sure. This was a Friday night, about nine o’clock, and I had nowhe
re to be. I walked up and down the road a few times, then came back home and read three pages of a book on the later Roman emperors before sitting down on the couch for more television.

  For weeks after that I worried that I wasn’t making the time count. I’d been given a second chance, and I needed to take advantage. One morning I got in my car and just started driving. West, naturally. Maybe I’d go all the way to the Pacific, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have a plan. Crossing the North Carolina border and entering Tennessee, I felt alive, but by the time I reached Kentucky, the monotony of the drive had settled in, and I’d lost interest. I spent one night in a nice hotel in Louisville, toured the famous bat factory there, drank some whiskey, and then drove back east.

  Not long after that I bought a plane ticket and flew to Ireland. I drank beers alone in a pub in Cork and listened to some decent music. Then I flew to Munich to see an old friend who’d settled there after graduate school, and one night I went home with one of his coworkers, a German girl who spoke very little English. Seeing my scar, she ran her fingers along it gently, a look of concern and pity on her face, and insisted, via hand signals and broken English, that she be on top lest I overexert myself. I tried to explain that the problem wasn’t the plumbing but the electrical, but this only further confused matters. She showed me her toilet and held up her fingers: One or two?

  A few days later I returned home—to Shula, North Carolina.

  The White Hairs, we called them, the old geezers who’d flooded into Shula over the last twenty years and seized control of our local government and civic groups and boards. You sometimes got the feeling there’d been a convention—a gathering of all the nation’s old people—and together they’d voted Shula as their new home. You couldn’t really fault them for it. Shula was beautiful after all, quaint but busy, the Blue Ridge Mountains visible in most directions.

  The White Hairs, really, had become the backbone of our town’s economy. Businesses thrived downtown—the antique stores and folk-art galleries and sandwich shops. Most restaurants were successful as long as they offered early seating. Large gated communities had sprung up to accommodate them—clusters of condominiums and townhouses with shared shuffleboard courts and swimming pools. To address their many medical needs and conditions, we’d added a second hospital, not to mention the various rehab centers and private practices.

  I’d had a front-row seat to many of these changes in my capacity as a commercial loan officer. My uncle, a soft-looking man with a hint of a British accent acquired after only two years of graduate school in London, was an executive with a national bank, and it was with his assistance that I’d finagled my way after college into a leadership development program designed to train promising new employees for careers in credit analysis and commercial lending.

  I’d been grateful for his help but also surprised by it. My uncle and my father had never been particularly close. I can recall only two childhood visits to my uncle’s home in Connecticut, a mansion with a horizon pool and a wine cellar. “All hat, no cattle” was how my father used to describe his brother, and I will admit that my uncle did put a premium on appearances. If he was bound soon for a vacation on a fancy coast, for instance, you better believe he’d find a way to worm that tidbit into the conversation. Still, when he’d offered me his help, I’d accepted it gratefully. What did I care if he was only intervening as a way of lording his good fortune and connections over my father? A leg up was a leg up. After completing the program I’d taken a job at a branch in my hometown.

  Shula was not a particularly old city, though we celebrated its heritage and culture regularly with parades and photographic displays at the public library. A lake at the edge of town—now not much more than a neighborhood runoff pond at the center of a weedy meadow—had once been a popular tourist destination. There’d been dances in the pavilion there—parties, vacations. There’d been a small amusement park with roller coasters and merry-go-rounds in the adjacent field. People had been happy there once. You saw these people in photographs in their full-body bathing suits, their swim caps. Women with coiffured dogs in their laps; men with slick hair on water skis.

  Their bright, untroubled faces, their voices rising up like so many clanging, noiseless bells—what had their lives been like? They were gone now, all of them, disappeared into the blue haze that surrounded the town.

  Some mornings the fog was so thick and impenetrable you’d forget the rest of the world was out there. Other cities, other countries, other lives. The mountains—blue, soft, ethereal—were more like suggestions of geological features than actual ones. Always they lingered in the distance. You could never seem to reach them. They had no edge, no sure boundary or beginning. Science confirmed their ancientness. The landscape was wild but intensely familiar. We were living in the ruins of mega-continents, on rolling hills ground down by millions of years of erosion.

  Crust. Thrusting sheets. Bedrock. I found it somewhat comforting to think of my limited time here on the ground in the context of that larger, deeper history.

  —

  IT WAS ON ONE SUCH FOGGY MORNING—about six months after my trip to Germany—that I was in my office at the bank and made a discovery that, arguably, changed the course of my life. I was reviewing the loan application for a Tex-Mex restaurant called Su Casa Siempre. The loan was a relatively modest one. The restaurant wanted to expand its dining area to the second floor of the house it occupied. On my desk I had a spreadsheet of its operating expenses, and I was whizzing through row after row of expenditures—Air-Conditioning Repairs, Catering Supplies, etc.—when I came to one marked Extermination and noticed an unusual figure:

  JANUARY $79

  FEBRUARY $79

  MARCH $79

  APRIL $2079

  Two thousand dollars in extermination costs? This April spike seemed to me an excessive figure—I was intrigued. Very likely it was a typo, but already I was imagining cockroaches dancing across the plates, breeding in the oven, spewing from the outlets. A harried line cook leaped into view swinging his spatula at rats the size of raccoons.

  I called the restaurant owner, and when she didn’t answer the phone, I had to leave a message: “Please call me at your earliest convenience,” I said.

  Out in the lobby I could hear the tellers laughing and chatting. The fortune tellers, they called themselves, because one of them had once brought a pack of tarot cards in to work and taped a card to each of their counters.

  Fool, Magician, Death.

  Jokes such as these in workplaces such as ours were not easily given up. We recycled them endlessly: to pass the time, to kill awkward silences, to feel like part of a team. Two of the Fortune Tellers were ladies in their late fifties—Susan and Diana were their names—both with short, fashionable dyed hair; tan, deep cleavage; and photos of their grandbabies on proud display, tacked to the cubicle partitions that separated them. The third teller was named Darryl, and he was roughly my age, a stoner with a silver stud in his ear who refused to tuck in his shirts despite company policy and who was never not swigging a five-hour energy drink.

  Our lobby was like most bank lobbies: a room with red carpets, off-white walls, and deposit slip kiosks. I had only to take two or three steps outside my office door to participate in conversations with the tellers, which I rarely ever did. I got the feeling that they preferred to be left alone. They didn’t like any interference from outsiders, the outsiders in this case being anyone on the other side of their counter. They were cliquey, is what it was.

  I would often lean back in my chair and listen to their chatter. On that particular morning, Diana was telling the other two about a medical procedure—elective—that she was seriously considering. Apparently she had never much cared for the color of her eyes, which she described as “mud brown,” and she was thinking she might try something called an eye-dye. For five thousand dollars, a doctor would inject her eyeballs with a specially designed virus—a bout
ique virus, whatever that was—which would alter her at the level of her DNA and, over a period of a few days, transform her muddy brown eyes into a watery blue.

  Darryl was very excited about this idea. He said he had a cousin who’d done it, and did Diana want to talk to her about it? Diana said she absolutely did want to talk to Darryl’s cousin about it. That reminded Darryl of something else he’d seen recently, a new brand of condom that turned green if it detected the presence of a sexually transmitted disease.

  “Say what?” asked Susan, who was always happy to play the role of the fuddy-duddy. She didn’t quite understand. How would this condom work exactly? You’d slip it on and it would do—what? Turn green if the other person had AIDS or herpes or whatever else?

  Yes, Darryl confirmed, precisely, except this magical contraceptive would also reveal if you had those diseases. It tested both partners, simultaneously, through contact with any of the various secretions.

  “Wait wait wait, hold up,” Susan said. “Let’s think about this for a minute. In order to secrete any fluids, there must first be penetration. There must first be the entry of the one organ into the other. The sexual act would need to commence, would it not, before the condom could tell you if one or both partners were diseased? Wouldn’t the penis need to ejaculate at least a modicum of fluid first?”

  This question went unanswered because Susan, the fuddy-duddy, had uttered the words “penetration,” “penis,” and “ejaculate” in rapid order, and now they were all giggling at the strange turn in their morning talk show. That’s how their conversations seemed to me, like empty talk show banter. Sitting at my desk, I couldn’t see them, and I often imagined them addressing a camera as they sat in tall chairs around a coffee table.

  When I stepped out into the lobby half an hour later I found Darryl standing bowlegged with his hands shaped like pistols at his waist. A dueler’s stance. He was staring hard at a kitten calendar on the far wall and seemed ready to draw and blast a hole through a feline head. Diana, hand over her mouth, was stifling a laugh, and Susan was thudding her palms together violently, fingers stiff and arched away from each other, her bracelets jangling on her tan wrists. Darryl drew his hand-pistol and fired at the wall.