Next Life Might Be Kinder (26 page)

“I guess swept back is how I feel. It's how I feel every night I meet you here, Sam.

“All that morning I had some sort of premonition. I think it was a premonition, though I didn't know how to credit it at the time. It was just a feeling. Like you think you're coming down with the flu or a bad cold. You just feel it in advance. You feel sort of hapless or something.

“Anyway, for lunch I had tomato soup, left over from the day before, and a cheese sandwich with a little mustard. Waiting for the soup to heat up in the saucepan, I picked up a pen and wrote out the paragraph on a napkin. Why would I do that? It was a cloth napkin! But that's what I did. I said to myself, when I started my soup, ‘Elizabeth, don't rush.' Because remember how fast I used to eat when we first met? Like I had an alarm clock next to the plate, remember? I knew it surprised you. We'd be out at some restaurant and just get started talking, and you'd look at my plate and it would already be empty, and you'd get a kind of surprised look on your face. But you know, from the start it never had anything to do with not wanting to sit for hours talking. It was just a habit from childhood, I suppose. But that changed, didn't it, and I eventually ate dinner more slowly. Sometimes more slowly than even you, who are the slowest slowpoke at eating dinner in all the history of eating dinners. And you're always so famished!

“So I was thinking about the paragraph and eating lunch. After lunch, I took a walk back over to Cyrano's. Just to walk and think some more and see if Marie was working, which this time she was. Oh boy, was Marie ever in a sour mood. You know how she gets. It was the boyfriend, naturally. The high school teacher, what's his name again? Oh yeah, Michael Roncier. So, Marie's on her high horse: ‘Michael wants me to act more like I'm in love with him, but I'm not an actress. He doesn't care if I'm really in love with him. But he's got this theory that if I start acting like I am, I might actually get there. I give him high marks for coming up with that, even though it's lame.' All sour and worked up like Marie gets. The thing is, when I said goodbye to Marie, she told me I seemed jittery and worried. ‘I'm not,' I said. But she noticed something.

“When I got back to the hotel, Max, the florist from down the block—you know, who delivers a bouquet to the lobby twice a week—he was there, short of breath. Derek Budnick was standing off to the side. Max was wheezing, gasping, and pale as paper. So Derek walked right over. Max kept saying, ‘I'm fine, I'm fine, I just need to sit down, catch my breath.' So Derek sat down with him on the sofa. The bouquet was lying on the reception counter. I didn't start to go upstairs yet, and pretty soon Max got his color back and was on his way. Everyone seemed to feel okay about him going back to the flower shop, and you know that Derek wouldn't have allowed that, had he thought there was something to worry about.

“I suppose just an average day in the hotel lobby, right? The comings and goings, the suitcases. You know how I seldom take the lift, but I decided to take the lift this time. But I failed to notice—just wasn't paying attention—that it was going down to the basement first. Too late, so down it went. And when it got to the basement, on stepped the creep Padgett himself. Creep creep creep. In the two steps out of the lobby and into the lift, I'd already gone back to obsessing about the paragraph from
The Victorian Chaise-Longue,
can you imagine? The scummy creep steps in next to me and right away says a creepy thing: ‘Well, Mrs. Lattimore, we can't go on meeting like this.' He's dumb as dishwater, so what else would you expect from the creep? Everything he says has ‘creep' written all over it. Plus, he reeked. Of what? Probably some cheap whiskey, I don't know of what. I should have pushed past him out into the basement and flown up the stairs to the lobby. Should have. Should have. Should have, darling. But up we went.

“In the lift I closed my eyes and tried to get lost in the paragraph again. But that didn't work. The creep was breathing hard. And when we got to our floor and I got out, Padgett got out too, and he said, ‘Mrs. Lattimore, I'm afraid I'm going to have that nice long talk with your husband. You know, the kind of talk house detective Budnick had with me. Yeah, I think it's time. Since you aren't being nice to me in the ways I want you to be nice to me, eh?' Which is when right there in the hallway I started shouting at the top of my lungs, ‘You sick creep! You think you're in a movie, sicko!' He reached out for me and I shouted really, really loud, ‘You even touch me, I'll tear your eyes out! I'm going to get Derek Budnick and then I'm going back to the police.' And that's when, at the mention of police, he got down on his hands and knees and said, ‘If you pray, pray now.' He was on his knees like he was praying. Suddenly he had a gun in his hand, and then he shot me, Sam, and I felt a terrible pain. It was really bad, terrible pain right here.” She touched near her heart. “I just looked at the Beelzebub. It's all such a nightmare, Sam. Right in our sweet little hotel. Right in our home. To try and take me away from you like that. Did he think he could take me away from you?

“Sam, Sam, Sam, please listen, because you look so upset. Know what I was thinking about this morning? Do you remember when Marie Ligget told us . . .”

 

Philip found me blacked out on the beach, up near the rickety fence halfway between his and Cynthia's house and where Elizabeth had stood. “Let's get you inside,” he said, “and then I'll ring up Dr. Trellis.”

I
WAS UNDER OBSERVATION
in Halifax Hospital for thirty days and now am back in my cottage. “Nervous exhaustion, that's quite the diagnosis,” Philip said. He had picked me up from the hospital and was driving me to Port Medway. “Cynthia said, ‘Well, Philip, you suffer that once a day, but it's over quickly and you have a drink. But our friend Sam Lattimore's suffered it for a couple years straight.' I think she even said ‘without surcease.' She's been on a recent kick, though, reading nineteenth-century novels.”

“I feel far less the nervous part,” I said, “but the exhaustion's something else.”

“Cynthia's made her famous goulash,” he said. “Dinner's around six-thirty, okay?”

In my driveway, as I got out of his car, Philip said, “Got your medication?”

“Yes, I do. But I'm not so inclined to take it.”

“It's meant to help you,” Philip said. “That's all I'm saying. It's meant to help you.”

I decided to try the medication. I think maybe Elizabeth's angry at me for not walking down to the beach and talking with her for all this time (the thought that she saw me and Istvakson still catches me out). Since I returned to my cottage, I've been down twenty-eight nights in a row, but no Elizabeth. She could be anywhere; I read in one book that the condition of Bardo “often requires journeys.” I'm certain I'll have the chance to tell Lizzy where I've been and we'll talk it through.

While I was in hospital, Dr. Nissensen paid me a visit. That was unexpected. Cynthia's and Philip's visits, and even the one visit from Derek Budnick, weren't all that unexpected. But Dr. Nissensen's was, and when he first came into my room, all I could say was “Our time is up.”

“That's funny, Sam,” he said. “How are you?”

“My doctor—Dr. Maurrette—diagnosed me as having had a nervous breakdown. ‘Nervous collapse' is how he put it. It probably won't surprise you that I disagreed. I said, ‘No, it's just I've always been somebody who reacts strongly to bad news.'”

“You were referring to how Elizabeth described being murdered? You told me in our final session that you were expecting her to tell you soon. Still, I suspect ‘bad news' may have sounded obtuse to Dr. Maurrette, since he wouldn't have had a context for it, or did he?”

“Given patient-doctor confidentiality, I can't reveal that.”

Dr. Nissensen laughed. “Nevertheless, I've known Andrew Maurrette for many years. He's an excellent psychiatrist.”

“He called our sessions ‘counseling.'”

“
I see. Well, rest assured, few are as highly regarded in our field. He telephoned me right away—you must've mentioned we'd worked together, Sam. Do you recall mentioning it to him?”

“No, I don't. Nope.”

“You look well and I wish you all the best. Of course, you know how to contact me.”

“Thank you, Dr. Nissensen. Thank you for dropping by.”

“Oh, almost forgot. I brought something for you. Some reading material.”

He handed me an academic journal.

“Much of it is esoteric gobbledygook, but I've marked an article by a British fellow, very insightful. Original thinker, somewhat of a literary bent. It may interest you.”

“I've got time to read. As you can see.”

“Well, Dr. Maurrette says you're to go home in two days.”

“You know, Dr. Nissensen, since I'm not coming to talk with you again, this article gives you the last word.”

“I suppose so. But only if you choose to read it.”

We shook hands and he left. I looked at the title of the article: “The Reprimanding Revenant: Some Thoughts on Hallucination as the Persistence of Grief.”

In that wing of the hospital, I wasn't allowed coffee. This was wrong, I felt. During my weeks there I often complained about it. However, shortly after Dr. Nissensen's visit, I asked one of the elderly volunteers for a cup of tea, and she brought me one. I sat down on my bed to read the article. Apart from some impenetrable jargon, I did find it well written. The author, a Dr. Kalderish, based in Dublin, first described her research methods and then stated:

 

I interviewed two hundred people who had suffered the loss of a loved one, and whose unifying experience was with what fell, in my opinion, into a category first named by Marie-Louise von Franz, a protégée of Carl Jung: the reprimanding revenant. This is a person, deceased for some time, who “comes back” and reprimands the grieving person for small mistakes made in the past, but most often for not being able to protect said apparition from harm. [This was never the case with Elizabeth!] However, based on all solid evidence, each of the two hundred grieving persons could not possibly have intervened at the moment of the revenant's death. But in the hallucinatory context, the revenant insists on the grieving person's culpability in her demise. There are antecedents in the literature. Studies of the psychological traumas of trench warfare in World War I provide accounts of men “seeing” their comrades after they had been witnessed being shot or blown apart by land mines; these comrades would in effect “appear” and scream such horrid indictments, they would induce a debilitating guilt and remorse in the survivors. The very terrain of warfare, miles and miles of muddy trenches, was called by one soldier “a labyrinth of wandering souls.”

It must be said that, in my study, the revenant just as often offered “loving and kind words.” In fact, in more than thirty cases, lengthy conversations were conducted between the revenant and the grieving person. “The lack of physical contact was, I'm quite sure, on both of our minds,” one subject said. “But we never spoke of it.”

 

I finished the article and started thinking of ways to refute many of its assertions. I even took out a notebook. Yet I didn't have much of a connection with Dr. Kalderish's results. For a minute or so I rehearsed a conversation I might have with Dr. Nissensen, but said to myself, “That would mean making an appointment—stop!” Then the volunteer brought in a piece of coffee cake, which I hadn't requested but was grateful for nonetheless.

T
ODAY IS JANUARY
17, 1974. I had my thirty-seventh birthday yesterday. Philip and Cynthia gave me a little party. It was just the three of us. “Want to watch an old movie with us, Sam?” Cynthia asked, after I'd blown out the candles and we'd had pieces of her delicious lemon cake and they'd given me five pairs of winter socks as a birthday gift. But I was tired and wanted to get back to my cottage. In bed, reading Brian Moore's latest, I suddenly recalled something Dr. Nissensen said. We'd been discussing my radio writing. “Well, Mr. Keen never had to contend with someone missing because of being in Bardo, did he?” That had made me really laugh at the time.

Acting as a kind of neighborly accountant, Cynthia has kept my modest finances in order. Since my hospitalization, I have got seventy-six pages of
Think Gently on Libraries
completed somewhat to my satisfaction. I've joined the local Naturalists Society, which meets once a month in the Port Medway Library, a group of fifteen people who are on cordial terms with one another, and only a few of them are competitive keepers of life lists. We mainly discuss birds we've seen. I don't otherwise socialize with these people, but the meetings are something I look forward to. So far, no meeting has run more than two hours.

Philip and Cynthia have invited Bethany Dawson to dinner a week from Sunday, and invited me, too. I know what is going on there. Cynthia has been direct: “Sam, ever since you ordered those books from John W. Doull and delivered them in person, Bethany has been intrigued. ‘Intrigued' shouldn't be too threatening, should it? Come on, what harm, dinner together? Besides, Bethany told me you're in the library a lot. Wear a pair of your new socks. We've known Bethany for ages and like her very much, and we love you, so for me and Philip it's all good company on a cold night.”

Since being released from hospital, I hadn't been back to Halifax, but last Wednesday I drove in to see the movie
Next Life.
The opening of the movie had drawn some brief fanfare in the newspapers and on the radio. Elizabeth's murder was back in the news, her photograph reappeared in the papers, and that resurrected all sorts of emotions. How could it not? I kept pretty much to the cottage during the first week the movie was showing. Naturally, there was mention in the papers of Istvakson's drowning, too. I truly despaired of Lizzy and Istvakson being linked in the public consciousness, but that's the way of the world, murder and drowning entwining them in celebrity anecdote. It all just makes a person sick. Anyway, Philip and Cynthia had gone to see the movie on opening day. I suppose they thought I'd avoid the movie at all costs. I thought that, too. It ran in Halifax for a total of twenty-five days.