Adapted from an image by ranplett
Simple Rules for
Coming Back from
the Dead
He supposed he would have to start writing his biography sometime. The past, even events of the past week, already rendered details grudgingly, with a tendency to sudden breakages, like old fondant, like drawing thread from a cloud of raw cotton. Here he was saying, “no, but you don’t understand, you’re so blind to everyone else, yes, blind! You don’t, you’ll never.” Even unhooked as they were from context, the words carried to him an unmistakable throat-tightening urgency, a sense of apocalyptic rightness.
But he’d forgotten who was blind, and to what. Kate, he supposed, but when? He tugged gamely at the recollection and it came loose in his hands, shivered into fiber, a chipped tile, an absurd objet d’art. Here, at another time, he was searching under couch cushions, under folded blankets, his mind already humming on some other matter, he remembered that, looking for—something. And whose couch? And that was only Tuesday last. He had no memory for dialogue.
He would do it tastefully, he thought. Third person, no italicized thinking. He had his models. Hemingway, especially. And writing it, and then reading it later, would be his way of making it seem as if it had really happened. That was the Hemingway. No way like the Heming-way, he thought. What he did remember was the two of them, he and Kate, backs propped on the unhewn posts that held up the front porch of the cabin, sitting on the porch rail in gently falling, early-fall-afternoon sunlight. Yes, he remembered that. Kate was wearing a broomstick skirt that clung a little damply to her legs, made a valley between them. He, Hap, sat facing her, leaning forward occasionally to tap his jay in the tile-shard ashtray on the rail between them. Kate had her head tilted back against the post, a cigarette pointed straight up. The soft sunlight got her face at an angle. Bright streamers of new leaves chased through the yard and off and down the mountain, and they were talking about how to come back to life. They’d made rules: Whatever you do, call first was the first one. And not after the fashion of horror-movie spirits; not a call-and-hang-up that left you breathless, breathing into the dead extension, who is this, why do you keep calling me? Not in a chipped, nail-scree kid-voice. Never at night. An answering machine message would be best; remember to keep your voice calm—friendly, perhaps, but under no circumstances gleeful.
There were other rules. Assuming the phone call went well, a date and time would be arranged for meeting. They’d meet at the cabin, of course. Not on an anniversary. On a Tuesday, say. Other than the call there’d be no omens, no portent. No mirror-writing, no his-or-her-favorite-song inexplicably playing. No finding his or her clothes lain across the bedspread in a perfect body-shape. No wind chimes or mousetraps sounding suddenly in the dark, death-empty house. The mousetraps were Hap’s contribution. Nothing, but nothing, scared him like a mousetrap in the dark. In much the same vein, personal conduct was to be closely controlled. Any appearing unexpectedly as one, oh, swung shut a door he’d just opened, any jump-cuts or close pans at all, in fact, even as a joke, were punishable with—well, not death, obviously. With some serious ire on the part of the living, then.
Instead—this Hap remembered—the dead party would come up the driveway in full daylight, maybe on a day like this one, coming as if he or she were simply returning from a walk, as if it were any normal, happy, sunshiny day. The dead would appear as in life. He or she would be visible from a good distance, would perhaps even stop and wait to be recognized, would wave a hand or a baguette for attention. The baguette was a peace offering. And besides, they reasoned, no situation could be too abnormal if it involved a baguette. Hi, the living would say—in Hap’s mind’s eye it’s himself alive and Kate dead. And she, Kate, the walking dead, would call, Hi. And she would walk up the steep part of the drive before the house with her clogs scattering and crunching the gravel. And she would be wearing the brown broomstick dress she was wearing even then. He would stop at the top end of the porch steps and watch her come, face set a little for climbing the steep part, baguette swinging, luminescent with sunlight. And she would stop and stand a moment at the bottom of the steps. Early blown August leaves would perhaps bubble across the yard and through her, or perhaps not. Hi, Hap would say again. Hey, she would say, I’m here.
Yes, that was how he’d write the biography. That was what the thin stuff of memory afforded him: love as endless arriving, never leaving, only everlasting, sun-struck greeting. That was what he saw—so clearly it was as if it were already, and still, and always, happening.
Copyright © 2008 by Richard Lee
