Before and Afterlives (12 page)

Neil works irregularly, odd jobs, temp work when he’s desperate, and sometimes he’ll tend bar. He did university for a few years, but he quit a semester before graduating. “It wasn’t fun anymore,” he explained. He’d been a Psychology major, a Philosophy major, an English major, as well as dabbling in Anthropology until it became too concrete, too biological, for his tastes. He switched majors every few semesters, and would then travel through the previous departments again, a phantom of academia.

“I’ve an insatiable mind,” he told me, after we’d been se
eing each other regularly for several weeks.

“I believe that,” I said. And I did believe it. I believed him as much as is possible when you’re beginning to know som
eone. It’s a sweet period of discovery, and you can only take what the other person says as reality. Or not. Skepticism is possible. But then, why would you be there, listening, taking in another person, only to disbelieve them?

“You’re a fool if you believe me, Marco,” he said.

“I’ve been called worse.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “But isn’t being called a fool somehow more hurtful?”

“Hmm.” I thought for a moment. We were eating dinner at my apartment, drinking merlot and lapping up spaghetti. I wiped a napkin against my mouth, then looked at him and said, “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On who calls you a fool.”

He grinned, then frowned quickly, looking down into his glass of wine.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, concerned, ready to soothe him. I was very ready to do that then. I still want to do that sometimes, soothe him, but I refrain from doing so. I might expect something in return. I might think Neil letting me care for him means something.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he said. “That’s the problem. Not
hing is the matter. With me. There’s no me to have a matter about.”

“That’s not true,” I said, swallowing the last of my wine.

“It is, Marco.” He scraped his chair back, stood up and removed our plates, the glasses, to start the washing up.

I stood and went to him by the sink and put my arms around his waist, rested my chin on his shoulder. The heat of him, the scent of him, something a little like salt and a little like ho
ney, the unbelievable solidity of his body was amplified by Neil’s claim of not-being.

“You’re here,” I said. “And I may be a fool, but I definitely see someone where you’re standing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t mean physically. I mean inside. Inside my head.” He tapped two fingers against his skull.

“That’s naïve nihilism,” I answered, slowly removing my arms from his waist. I turned to leave him to the dishes, his forearms submerged in soapy water, and then he asked what I saw in him. Right then, at that moment.

“What do you see?”

What did I see? I didn’t know if I’d be able to tell him, but he was calling my bluff. Had I really been paying attention? He stood before me with a plate in one hand and a dish rag in the other, waiting for my answer, which I found was ready on the tip of my tongue. Sometimes I surprise myself.

I told him he was outlandish, a loner, a hothouse flower who would wither if removed from his greenhouse. “This city,” I said, “is your center. From here the sun can reach you. You rely on its depression, its darkness, its anonymity to the rest of the world. People don’t even know this place exists. Some of those people live here. I’ve made up a slogan for Youngstown,” I told him. “Youngstown: Why fix it if it isn’t broken?”

But it was broken, is broken. No money, no jobs. This is what you call an economic depression. An economic depre
ssion means there’s no money, and people are depressed about it. Buildings haven’t been updated since the seventies, since the steel mills closed down. Sidewalks buckle, graffiti looms, vacant lots appear daily, filled with patches of yellow-brown grass and shattered beer bottles, and still the city will not change. Here, entropy is the golden rule. For some people that’s attractive.

Neil didn’t say anything. He continued washing up, sulking silently, his back bent over the sink, his head lowered, his e
ntire body a question mark.

How to tally, to compose, to bring together answers? And what to do with them once they’ve been found?

“Are you working?” I ask when he calls me.

“I’m doing some carpentry for the dancer,” he says.

“Is she paying you?”

“Of course she’s paying me, Marco. I’m not a fool.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied.”

“Forget it.”

“I will.”

“Good.”

They’ve been seeing each other for two weeks now, maybe more, Neil and the flamingo. Her name, he’s informed me, is Margaret Stanbottom. Not quite what I’d imagined for a dancer, but I can never predict who Neil will drag home. Or in this case, who he’ll follow home.

They’re living together, in her half of a Victorian house on Valencia. She’s very wealthy, according to Neil, and she keeps him in clothes and well-fed, amongst other luxuries. She bought him the cell phone, which now has a message that goes something like: “I’m not here, but nothing changes. Leave me a message. That helps a lot.”

Helps who? Helps Neil feel real, although not anyone would understand that. It’s code, like mandarin poetry, like Tori Amos lyrics. It’s Neil giving his callers an emotional update. I don’t leave messages. The cell phone will list my number as having called him. That’s enough to tell him I care.

He and Margaret are living life simply, he tells me. Their lives have become slightly hermetic. Excepting her dance r
ecitals and his weekend pool league at the Shamrock, they spend most of their time at home. Margaret’s dancing and Neil’s pool league are the last remains of their social beings. They’ve agreed that each of them should keep hold of something outside of their relationship.

The Shamrock, house of eighties music that it is, is Neil’s choice for keeping contact with the world. The thing about the Shamrock, though, is that more than half of its patrons are from Youngstown or Cleveland.

“It’s a kind of halfway house for transplanted Northeastern Ohioans,” Neil jokes.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I asked when he first me
ntioned this.

“Not at all,” said Neil. “After I got off my train in Mont
erey, I was hanging out at the wharf and I ran into this sweet couple who live in Berkeley. They were down for a weekend holiday, and it turned out they had moved from Youngstown to the Bay Area five years ago. They told me to go to the Shamrock when I rolled into San Francisco, that a lot of people from Ohio hang together there.”

So Neil went first thing after his bus reached the city, and of course this couple hadn’t been lying. The bartender, the wai
tresses, everyone in the Shamrock had originally grown up in Ohio, nine out of ten from Cleveland or Youngstown. The rest were from Akron or Kent. Sandy, the bartender, helped Neil find a room to rent in a boarding house run by a Pakistani family. “I could smell curry morning, evening and night,” Neil said.

“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I asked. “Isn’t it bizarre to find a sort of regional subculture centered in a particular bar?”

“Not really,” Neil said. “I mean, maybe a little at first, but after a while, it just felt natural. I met Margaret at the Shamrock, too.”

“Margaret’s from Ohio?”

Neil laughed. I imagined him shaking his head and grinning at my stupidity.

“Margaret,” said Neil, “cannot be categorized into any sort of region or geography. I’d say she’s a citizen of the world, but even that doesn’t describe her correctly. A citizen of the universe, is Margaret.”

“She’s from Mars then,” I said, getting in a little gibe on the flamingo. “That would explain her talent for floating. Doesn’t Mars have more gravity? Of course she’d float on this planet.”

“No,” Neil said. “Actually, we don’t have the capability to pr
onounce her world’s name.”

For every bit of information, for every detail of his life he gives me, with which to build a model of his world away from me, another gap opens in the gulf between us. When the world was still new and undiscovered, not fully charted, the old map-makers used to close off the edges of their maps with the words “There Be Dragons”. When I think of Neil and the Shamrock, of Margaret, I imagine myself in a tiny boat rocked in a sea carved with raucous waves. I reach the edge of the ocean, where Margaret Stanbottom resides, queen dragon of the depths, her scales glittering under the water, her breath foul, her rows of teeth sharp and eager, and my tiny boat slides off the edge of the world into darkness and cold points of light.

How to tally, to compose, to bring together answers? And what to do with them once they’ve been found?

We used to spend our weekends lying around my apartment, li
stening to music, or sometimes we’d walk into the city park, which is surprisingly beautiful and ranges for miles. The oasis in the desert of post-industry. Our favorite spot was Lanterman’s Mill, where we’d stand on the back platform, leaning against the guard rail, where we could almost reach out to the waterfall and touch it as it crashed beneath our feet, where it once turned the wheel of the mill. A covered bridge spanned the air above the waterfall, and once, on a warm spring morning, we stood below and watched a couple above us being married. Their families crossed from either side of the bridge as part of the ritual of joining. Neil felt it was over-wrought. I said it was nice. A nice thing. I felt that. I still do.

We went home from the park that day and made love only moments after returning. Neil’s T-shirt, hanging limply from the lampshade. My jeans, straddling the back of a chair. His lips moved over my body, eager, more eager than I could ever r
emember. I was quite taken with him like this, but also a bit suspicious. Why was he acting so determinedly passionate? Not that I minded. But my brain was saying, Something is wrong.

Afterwards, we lay exhausted on the rumpled bed sheets, sta
ring at the ceiling. Actually how it happened was, I stared at the ceiling. Then I looked over and saw Neil staring up as well. It was a good feeling, a kind of synchronicity. I started to wonder what else we did at the same time. I listened to our breathing. We breathed in time together. I put my ear to his chest and listened to the hum and gurgle of his inner workings. I imagined mine sounding the same.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Listening.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Definitely. You have an orchestra in there.”

“An orchestra? Ha!” He threw his head back and launched into a fit of laughter. “It’s all music to you, isn’t it, Marco?”

I nodded and smiled.

“And does your passion for music rub off on those old l
adies and spoiled children you tutor?”

“I hope,” I said. I taught piano, and it brought in decent money. The only downside was having to drive out of the city into the suburbs, where everyone I tutored lived.

“Do they listen to you, Marco?” he asked. “Do you speak to them like you do me?”

“I don’t speak differently to different people,” I told him.

“But you do,” he said. “You do, and you don’t have any control over it.”

“How so?”

He turned his face to me, but stared somewhere down towards the end of the bed. “It’s not you, or anyone’s fault, Marco,” he whispered. “People just do it. They change how you talk. They hear what they want to, hear it how they want it to sound, so much that if you spoke angrily to someone who didn’t want to be hurt by you, they’d hear you differently. Or likewise, if you spoke lovingly to someone who didn’t want to be loved by you, they’d turn your tone into something vile. It’s a defensive strategy. It must be hardwired. People will never truly understand each other.”

“And how do you know this?” I asked. I took his theories ser
iously, even though I didn’t believe half of them. It was a conscious decision, to take anything he said seriously, if not literally. I thought it a respectable thing to do, and so I asked him, “Why do you think this is true?”

“I’ve gathered data,” he said, turning his face away from me, staring back at the ceiling again. He twirled his index finger in the hair around his navel for a moment, then lifted it to rub his eye. “Firsthand experience, Marco,” he continued. “Empirical evidence abounds.”

It was the first time I began to distrust him. Had he pulled my strings at one time or another, to see how I’d react to the crazy things he said? Played a game to confirm his theories? I stood up from the bed, slid my jeans on, and walked out of the room, scratching the back of my neck. A nervous habit.

Neil followed me. When I went into the living room and sat in front of the television, he stood in my way. When I moved into the kitchen and sat at the dinner table with a book, he stood b
ehind me, his chin on my shoulder, breathing hotly, reading along with me, a pet peeve of mine. I snapped the television off with the remote, snapped the book closed, and finally shouted, “What do you want?”

“A true answer,” he said.