“Oh. I’ll make sure the Amundson studies are filed properly,” she said at last, coolly, and he felt a flicker of victory that she now thought him a total asshole instead of mentally impaired.
The week before, he’d pulled The Tempest from the shelf in his bedroom and flipped to the end, but when he came to the line “Our revels now are ended,” the words seemed to shiver in his mind’s grasp, like a moment that was even now passing. How could he not know that word, revels? He, who had read and reread this play, this speech, a hundred times? He had to look it up in the damn dictionary. He should copy out his whole library, he thought, until his hands were swollen, copy every last word from every one of his books, so that he would retain a physical memory there in his hands of all those words he couldn’t bear to lose.
He leafed through the manuscript in his lap. He’d e-mailed it to his agent, of course (it was no longer a paper world); but he’d also printed it out so he could feel the weight of it. A lifetime of work; the strongest cases, distilled for the populace. Decades of patient labor doing the casework, years of writing draft after draft, shooting for clarity, always clarity. His last chance at making a difference: he’d worked like a maniac for four and a half years to finish it while his mind was still capable, before the fog rolled in. Some days he’d forgotten to eat.
The academic community would always consider Anderson a failure. He knew that. There was a moment, when he had first left his job at the medical school and his colleagues still valued him, when his books had been reviewed: twice by The Journal of the American Medical Association, and once in The Lancet. But as his colleagues aged they forgot about him, or more accurately they forgot they had respected him once. No one in that world had shown him any attention for decades now. He was famous in the paranormal research community, of course; he was invited to speak everywhere they studied ESP, or near-death experiences, or mediums. But he would never be accepted again by the scientific community, the only community he had ever really belonged to; he had finally given up that battle, decades after Sheila had exhorted him to do so. It was over.
But now he had written something for a different audience: he was aiming for nothing less than the world.
“If people can understand your data—not academics, I mean real people—it might change something for them.” Sheila had said this to him more than once, but only gradually had he realized the force of her logic, when she was already fighting the heart disease that would kill her.
When he considered his future readers now, he pictured a man like himself, back before any of this had started, when he was at the medical school. He saw himself on a chilly Friday evening walking back from his office through the square, puzzling over a study on somatic symptom disorders, tempted by the warmth and light of the bookstore. Stepping in for a quick browse, he glances at the books on the table, searching for something to grab his attention—and the book calls out to him. He picks it up and flips it open to the first page. Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.
Evidence? he imagined the man thinking to himself. Impossible. But he sits down anyway on a nearby leather chair, and begins to read.…
Anderson knew it was a fantasy. But he had been a man like that once. He, too, had needed evidence. And now he could provide it. He could leave his mark. He had felt full of confidence, until yesterday. Until he had talked to his literary agent and found that every publisher had turned him down. When he’d hung up the phone, he kicked the manuscript across the room, scattering pages like ash.
Now he looked at the words again.
Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.…
No; he would not let this stop him. He thought of that other Amundson, the Norwegian who had discovered the South Pole, his victory dwarfed by the noble failure of his competitor, Robert Falcon Scott. Scott, who had perished with his men in the frozen tundra. A brave man who had died trying, the cold claiming him toe by toe, foot by foot. Another casualty of the terra nova, the great unknown.
Five
She was late.
The day had started badly. Noah had awoken in the night again, upset from a nightmare and drenched with urine from head to toe. She’d tried in the morning to clean his stinky body with wipes as he squirmed and whimpered but finally gave up, dusting him with baby powder and dropping him sulking and emitting an unmistakable litter-box odor at Little Sprouts.
So: she was late. It would have been fine if it hadn’t been the Galloways. The Galloway renovation had been one of those jobs in which everything that should have gone one way went the other. They had moved in two weeks ago, and she’d been at the house almost daily since then, including a visit on Thanksgiving morning.