“Won’t change a thing, I’m afraid,” said the Keeper.
She glared at him. “We will be in a plane thirty-six thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean at the end of the—what did you call it, the wake? What’s going to happen? We just vanish out of our seats like some Willy Wonka magic trick?”
“You’ll see,” said the Keeper.
Everyone went with Whitley except me.
I couldn’t. I was too devastated, too scared to move so far away from my parents, to be trapped in a box in the sky with them.
Them.
They were them to me too now. I wasn’t one of them, not anymore. If this situation had made anything clear, it was that: that the very people I’d once loved and trusted most in the world had become total strangers.
What had I done to deserve this? To end up in hell with them?
I couldn’t think about it. No, I couldn’t let my mind move ahead. It had to stay on a tight leash tied to this moment. It was all I could handle.
I watched them pile with varying degrees of conviction into Cannon’s Jeep. It was obvious that they suspected Whitley’s plan, an impetuous flight westward to a tropical island, was futile. Yet they went ahead. For a show of solidarity? Some last, vain hope that it might actually work, that the Linda’s Gulfstream V tearing through the pink cotton-candy clouds with its beige calfskin seats and trays of fanned-out mango slices would be the loophole, the wormhole, the Get Out of Jail Free card to puncture this nightmare?
I stumbled down the steps, barely aware of the rain drenching me as I climbed into the truck. As I backed out, I saw that the Keeper had managed to free himself from Whitley’s knots. Once again he was at the entrance, his face bloody and red, Gandalf at his side, as if the dog had always belonged to him.
This time the old man didn’t utter a word. He didn’t have to. His smile at me as I drove past him said it all.
See you later.
You can’t stay awake.
We tried that. No matter how many cups of coffee or how many cans of Red Bull or Monster energy drinks you down, no matter how many caffeine pills or how much ginseng you take, your body gets pulled into the heaviest hollow of sleep you’ve ever felt in your life. The next thing you know, you’re right back where you started.
Back at the wake.
You can’t kill yourself either.
Kip tried that. He hanged himself with one of E.S.S. Burt’s belts in an upstairs bedroom. I didn’t see him. Martha told me. The next wake, as usual, he was right beside me in the backseat of the Jaguar, a healthy color, no black-and-blue marks around his neck, no swollen face.
Like nothing had happened.
“We’re immortal,” said Cannon. “We should take over the White House.”
“In eleven point two hours?” said Martha. “That’s not enough time to drive to Chicago, much less rule the free world.”
Tell your parents. Call the police. Have the Keeper arrested. Call a shrink. Check into the psych ward of Butler Hospital and ask the attending physician to make tomorrow arrive, please. Confess to a priest. Tell a bus driver, a cabdriver, the tired waitress at the twenty-four-hour diner who’s seen it all, the bent-over elderly woman in the frozen foods section of Price Rite buying a shocking number of pepperoni Hot Pockets, the man in the leather jacket browsing engagement rings at Kmart. Read the two hundred and fifty-two books in the science section of the Warwick public library, and a zillion textbooks on Google Books, trying to determine if ever in the history of the world some sage like Copernicus, Aristotle, Darwin, or Hawking has ever written or even hinted about such a thing as errors in time, cosmic waiting rooms, lethal lotteries in limbo, human terrariums in hell.
“What’s the subject you’re searching for again?” the librarian asked me.
“It’s called a Neverworld.”
She typed on the keyboard, shaking her head.
“Nothing comes up in the Library of Congress.”
We tried every one of these things in the beginning.
Every time, we woke up in the exact same place, exact same time. We were songs on repeat, flies in a mason jar, echoing screams in a canyon that could not fade.
The ongoing experience of Recurring goes against the very heart of being human, and it is—I will tell you this without flinching—unbearable. The mind rages trying to disprove it. When it can’t, the brain breaks down with shocking ease. The psyche is fragile. It is a child’s sand castle in an incoming tide. Never before had I understood how little control we had over our world, or really anything except our own actions, and now my little life didn’t even belong to me. We were helpless passengers strapped inside a spaceship circling Mars. The sun, the sky, the stars—how long did I stare at them, lying on the deck chair by the pool in the pouring rain, wishing I could just be them, a collection of gas and fire? I’d even take a beetle, a blade of grass, anything, so long as it was outside the Neverworld.
“Take the vote,” urged the Keeper. “Just take the vote.”
We took the vote. Of course we did.
We voted for the first time early in our arrival in the Neverworld. Twilight Zone. Purgatory. Doomed-Fate-Survivor-Homeroom-Freaky-Friday Bullshit. We called it all kinds of names, as if insulting the unknown forces keeping us here would make them change their minds.
We assembled in Wincroft’s library like colorful characters in the final pages of a murder mystery waiting for the genius detective to unmask the killer. We sat in club chairs. Whitley served champagne. We wrote the name of our chosen survivor on a scrap piece of paper, the Keeper collecting them.
“There is no consensus,” he announced.
The second time we voted, we each gave a speech beforehand in an attempt to persuade the others why we deserved life and not the others. We were defense attorneys in a courtroom speaking to a jury of the prosecutors, a circular setup of justice that would never work. The speeches ranged from altruistic (Cannon) to woodenly scientific (Martha) to childish and tone-deaf (Whitley, revealing a charitable streak she’d never had before, announcing she’d supply the entire continent of Africa with clean water). Kipling, when he stood up to speak, fell over, he was so drunk.
“You should vote for me because you shouldn’t vote for me,” he said. “I’m a mediocre, fucked-up shithead.”
I spoke last.
All I said was that I was an ordinary girl destined for an ordinary life, but they could vote for me because I’d make it my aim to do small acts of kindness every day.
As I said it, I was acutely aware that I sounded as disingenuous and desperate as they all did. Even worse, none of them were listening. They watched me, sure, but their attention was buried under the weight of their fates, fastidiously, hungrily inspecting it like Gollum inspecting the Ring, wondering if the Neverworld was real.
I couldn’t blame them. I was a blubbering mess too. Rarely had I passed the eleven point two hours without bawling as I drove to Westerly to see my parents at the Dreamland, usually just observing them without their knowledge, because to actually spend time with them made me sob uncontrollably the next wake. I’d tried explaining to them what was happening.
“I’ve been in a car accident, and I might die, and this limbo is called the Neverworld Wake according to this weird old man who won’t leave us alone.”
They always listened. Yet I could see that the only real feeling they had was devastation, believing that Jim’s death had messed me up even more than they’d realized and I needed twenty-four-hour psychiatric care. So I’d gotten in the habit of sitting in the theater, unseen, a few rows behind them, beside this massively fat guy in a Brooklyn Book Drop T-shirt. I always smiled at him, thinking: Do you realize how lucky you are? You have a tomorrow. I ate popcorn, watched His Girl Friday, and snuck out before the lights came on.
The result of that vote was no different.