Blackberry like the eye of a fly. Cut the liver out of the clock, wrap in wax paper and write a number in grease pencil. Do what they say and survive. Cut flowers for the table. Tell no one what day it is. Sleepwalk instead of dream. Run don’t walk. Go to town on Thursday—buy gingham and salt. Forget the dead. Keep singing if you forget the words. Love the ferns.
Dr. Brandywine avoids eye contact with Elise. “We’re going to keep him under observation,” he mumbles. “Patience.”
In the smoking room, which she’s gotten to know well, Elise has just lit another menthol, exhaling out the cracked but chained window.
“He said your name!” Jolie exclaims.
Elise clutches pack and lighter. “He did?”
She runs through the hall, sneakers squeaking, and pushes into the room where Jamey looks out the window.
She falls onto him, and he almost laughs.
“Hi,” he says, in a new voice, his bruised eye lavender now.
“Oh my fucking Jesus Christ.”
He runs a hand over her hair, breathes her in, kisses her cheek.
Something moves at the base of her spine—a worm of truth. “Are you okay?” she says quietly.
He tries to smile. “I have questions,” he says.
She smiles uncertainly. “Ask,” she prompts.
He bites his lip. “How long have I been dead?”
There’s silence.
“Like, how long you haven’t been communicating with anybody?” she asks.
He tries to understand her. “No, dead.”
She laughs. “You’re fucking with me!”
He grins, polite, unsure. “Is this purgatory?”
“This is a treatment center,” she says, firmly, still smiling. “In Midtown Manhattan.”
“Actual Manhattan?”
She glares. “I don’t think this is fucking funny. If you don’t—”
Jolie walks in with Dr. Eva Lessing, a very tall woman with a jet-black bob.
“This is Dr. Lessing. She’ll be taking over, okay?” says Jolie.
“Great,” Elise stumbles, in shock.
“How you feeling, Jamey?” Dr. Lessing asks.
He turns away.
Dr. Lessing asks Elise if he spoke.
“He did, actually,” she says. “He wanted to know where he is, stuff like that.”
The two women look at Elise.
“Anything else?” says Lessing.
Elise shrugs and tries to smile and forces her dry mouth to say: “I wish.”
MAY 1987
Sunshine bores into the apartment, and dust hangs in chutes of light.
It’s been five days since talking to Jamey about his death, and she hasn’t been to the hospital once. She’s abandoned him.
Elise called in sick to work this morning, planning to get it together, and she just lies in bed with Buck. Never in her life has she been paralyzed like this. Every time she gets up to brush her teeth, or put on shoes so she can go back, she starts crying so hard she can only stumble into bed.
“I hate you, Jamey!” she calls out, like a kid.
But in the darkness of the bedroom, Buck’s garnet eyes gleam.
“I know,” she finally admits to him, whose tail thumps once.
Elise drags on sweatpants, a jean jacket, the Yankees hat. Gold earrings.
“I’m going,” she tells the dog.
At Gracie Square, Elise finds Dr. Lessing’s office. Calligraphied degrees on the wall, lilacs in a Japanese vase. The window is dirty.
It’s confession time.
“He hasn’t said a word since you left,” Lessing muses.
“Really?”
“Really.”
They watch each other across the desk.
Elise says: “I should…tell you something.”
The doctor tilts her head. “Shoot.”
“He asked me…”—Elise fiddles with her earring—“how long he’s been dead.”
“What was your answer?”
“I explained he wasn’t dead.”
“Of course. And then?”
“The way he looked at me, he knows he’s dead. Like, I can’t tell him otherwise.”
“Gotcha.” Lessing suddenly smiles widely. “People think all kinds of things, don’t they?”
Elise is taken aback by this breeziness. “Yeah?”
“Look. I’ve seen stranger stuff. We’ll get him sorted.”
One little flower-bell falls from the lilac head, unprovoked.
This is a sickness that doesn’t start or end in the bowels, in measles, in a high temperature or a tin pan of vomit. It’s all light and darkness, creeping through his cells, staining the molecules of his soul one by one. It’s the photosynthesis of ideas and memories, impressions, dreams. The body actually likes to host sickness, courting this rash or feeding that tumor, letting those chemicals glitter and shimmer through the blood. There’s a way to resolve chaos and that’s to finish what was started, and every organism knows this emergency plan without being told.
He’s thankful the curtains remain closed in this room. He doesn’t have to see humanity. Little kids always peering into the window, runny noses pressed to glass, eyes flickering over him. Keep them away.
He tries to figure out what his “body” is made of now. It seems to be bleached or processed or desiccated wood—like toy airplane wings—balsam, he thinks—is that correct? He gently mauls his “flesh” and decides this is right—it’s turned into something airy, light, but not too fragile. So interesting!
Morning light burns through the shade, and Jamey gets meds with red punch. A nurse stands by while he showers.
When Elise and Lessing arrive, Jamey’s back in bed, hair side-parted by someone else.
“I don’t bite, promise,” Dr. Lessing says, sitting in the chair.
Jamey shoots daggers at Elise for bringing in this stranger.
“How old are you, Jamey?” Lessing says, scanning a sheet.
Jamey hesitates. “Do you mean—how old was I when I died?”
Elise smirks because he sounds stupid, fiddles with her earring.
“Sure,” Lessing says.
“Twenty-one.”
Dr. Lessing ponders his demeanor. “You seem…calm for someone who’s dead.”
“I’ve never felt this calm.”
Elise drums her nails on the meal tray.
“Jamey, any brain injury in the last year or two?” Lessing asks. “Concussions? Any little car accidents?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Are you on meds?”
“Just the ones you make me take,” he says.
“Have you been depressed this past year?”
Now he rubs the long scab on his chest, thoughtful. “I’ve always been depressed, maybe.”
“Have you been suicidal in the past?”
“Not literally.”
“Do you have thoughts of suicide now?”
Jamey smiles with condescending amusement. “That would be superfluous.”
“Is there mental illness in your family?”
“Just profound unhappiness on both sides.”
“Substance abuse history?”
“None.”
Lessing leans back, hands clasping one knee. “Do you want to tell me what happened that night?”
“I watched my soul go up the escalator to the next world,” he says.
Elise says: “That was Matt, in your coat.”
Lessing assures him: “It’s okay if you were confused, if you thought that was you.”
Jamey evaluates her for a moment. “I know you’re testing me, and I don’t appreciate it.”
Elise stands up, infuriated. “Wow. You’re being crazy,” she says, her voice shaking. “You better quit this right now because you’re pissing me off—”
Lessing escorts her out, soothing her as they walk down the corridor, where wheelchairs have left black stripes on the walls.