Boundaries

LICENSE NOTES:

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
 
This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
 
If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.
 
If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy.
 
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

NOVELS:

STRANGE SEEDS

NON FICTION:

THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a
one time
20% savings!
 
We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available.
 
Find us at:
 
http://store.crossroadpress.com

When I think of The Other Side, I think of being reunited with loved ones who have passed over. And of being with them for eternity.

I think of eternity. No beginning. No end. It’s a concept that’s impossible to grasp but fun to think about.

I think that happiness will be continuous because The Other Side is the ultimate reward, after all.

And I think about love. I think that, in heaven, on The Other Side, love will be sweet and everlasting. And I think that I will have to get used to love without sex, because sex is earthbound and temporal. Because the spirit, I think—desperately rationalizing—cannot have any physical needs. It cannot need to eat, or defecate, or drink, or have sex because it no longer possesses a stomach, a colon, a tongue, genitalia. Its needs are . . . spiritual. Intellectual. Divine.

It spends eternity contemplating eternity (a pastime which may not seem very worthwhile to the earthbound, but which is probably the truest and happiest expression of the spirit).

And when I think of The Other Side, I think, too, that all these ideas may be no more valid than the babblings of Neanderthals who look at the moon and believe that it is a hole in the sky.

I think that The Other Side may be something completely
unguessable
.

—T.M. Wright

June 4, 1990

Ithaca, New York

BOOK ONE

A TOE IN THE WATER

T
hese snapshots were nothing more than animal protein and a couple layers of colored dye and silver nitrate that the light got at for a microsecond. They were no more substantial than that—they weren’t Anne or even representations of Anne because the animal proteins, the dyes and silver nitrate had no intention of creating representations of her.

These snapshots were a fraud because they coaxed from him only microseconds of Anne’s life as he had witnessed it and remembered it. And her life could not be measured in microseconds.

So, if the police photographs, the photographs taken at her autopsy (and it was not
her
autopsy at all, was it?) showed a face as placid and blank as air, they showed only a couple hours of the existence of flesh over bone. Then the decay started in earnest and those images, as well, became a lie.

Still, he had to take these snapshots out and look at them. There were memories of Anne that existed around them. They were not his only memories of her, but they were among his best memories because snapshots are often taken during the best of times.

He turned some of the snapshots over—the ones that were most appealing or called up especially memorable moments—and checked for a date or a notation, or both. Then he turned the snapshot around, looked at it again for a second, set it aside and got another from the pile. He wept as he looked at them. He didn’t want to weep. He thought that if someone came to the door that he would answer it red-faced and then would have to bear up under his visitor’s embarrassment. It was a kind of agony he wanted to spare himself, an agony he wanted to spare the people who came to visit him.

He got his pipe out of his sports coat pocket and lit it from a pack of book matches on his desk. The blue tobacco smoke—it smelled of cherries—did a slow dance around his head and made his eyes sting. He put the pipe out, set it in a glass ashtray on his desk, and put the snapshots in a bottom drawer of the desk. Then he stood and went to a window at the back of the room. The window overlooked fields and hedgerows that were dark green and moist this day after a rain—
Idyllic
, he thought—and, as if the fields and hedgerows could answer, he asked aloud, "Where is Anne? Where is my sister, Anne?"

~ * ~

His friend, Christian Grieg—a stocky, square-faced man with gentle and expressive soft blue eyes—was at that moment sitting in a little restaurant called
Oliver’s
with a woman named Karen Duffy. He had had a close, platonic relationship with her for several years. He said, "David’s on the ragged edge."

Karen said, "And for good reason."

A waiter came over and asked if everything was okay. Karen nodded—she was a tall, lithe redhead in her late thirties, quick to smile and quick to frown—and Christian said, "Sure, everything’s good." The waiter went away.

Karen added, "I’d be at the edge, too." She paused, then went on, "I’d be
over
the edge, I think." She gave him a soft, quivering smile, as if in embarrassment, reached and took the last whole wheat roll from a green breadbasket at the center of the table. She said, holding it up, "You want this?"

Christian shook his head.

Karen split the roll in two with her hands and buttered one of the halves. She liked to eat. Christian thought that she ate more than he did.

He said, "I think David is suicidal."

Karen pursed her lips and set her buttered roll on her plate. "I think," she said, "that David is very depressed." She cocked her head. "You think he’s weak, don’t you? You’ve always seen him that way."

"It’s not a matter of weakness, Karen. For heaven’s sake, it’s not a matter of weakness. The kind of loss he’s had has driven other people . . ." He threw a hand into the air in frustration. He finished, "To the edge."

Karen thought a moment, then declared, "Anne was his
twin sister
. She wasn’t his lover. She wasn’t his wife. She wasn’t his daughter. She was his
twin sister
!"

"Dammit," Christian burst out, "what’s the difference, really? Sister, daughter, wife. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they were close. Very close." He could feel a fit of temper coming on and shook his head quickly to push it away. He went on, "I’m sorry, Karen. You didn’t know him. You didn’t know their relationship the way I did. They were friends, just like we are. Surely you can understand that kind of relationship. If you . . . if something happened to you, I’d probably be feeling the same way David’s feeling."

"That’s a nifty way of advancing your own argument, Christian."

He looked confusedly at her. "I don’t understand."

She sighed. "You’re right, though. I wasn’t as close to their relationship as you were. I didn’t understand it the way you apparently understand it." She picked up her roll, studied it a moment, frowned, put it back on the plate. "Can we get out of here, Christian? I’m feeling hemmed in."

"Hemmed in?" he asked. "By what?"

She answered
unself
-consciously. "By this conversation. Let’s go somewhere else."

Christian said, "Yes. Okay." He paused. "Let’s go and see David."

She looked at him a moment, thought of protesting, then, with a feigned smile, nodded her assent.

~ * ~

Anne Case was murdered on May 9th. May 11th would have been her thirty-fifth birthday. When she awoke at 7:30—her usual waking time—on the day of her murder, she had her day planned. She was going to have a breakfast of orange juice and a rye bagel and was going to follow that with an hour’s worth of work in her vegetable garden, near the south side of the house. She was growing carrots, peas, turnips, and corn. She had been pessimistic about the corn because of bad luck with it in previous years; she blamed that bad luck on various garden pests. When she was finished in the garden, she was going to go to her study and write. She wrote poetry. It was confessional, romantic, and eminently
unpublishable
, but she wrote it every day, and for the same reasons, she supposed, that other people wrote journals: to keep the daily events of her life and her outlooks on life in some perspective. After that—and she usually spent a half hour or forty-five minutes at it—she was going to call her brother, David Case, to confirm that he would be coming over for lunch. Anne left her house only rarely. She was an agoraphobic. It was a nearly lifelong condition and she had stopped trying to fight it years before. Her house was her world, and that was okay. It was a very large house—one she had inherited upon the death of her mother and father, along with a substantial trust fund set aside in recognition of the fact that she could not work outside the home—and it served nicely as a universe all its own. There was a music room, a library, a sewing room, a sitting room, several bedrooms furnished in various styles, three full bathrooms, a parlor, a game room—in which she had installed a pool table, some pinball machines, and a video game called SPACE INVADERS—a cavernous kitchen and, on the third floor, what she referred to as a "ballroom." The floors there had been polished to a magnificent shine, three chandeliers put up, and a small stage built at one end. It was her habit, at least once a day, to drift into and quickly out of the ballroom, each of the bedrooms, the living room, the parlor. She enjoyed these rooms for mere moments at a time, peopled them with characters from her fantasies, and then went on to other things.