In Persuasion Nation (23 page)

Turns out when the recently dead breathe in your face they show you
the future.

I see Mom and Dad trapped here forever, reënacting their deaths
night after night, more agitated every year, finally to the point of
insanity, until, in their insanity, all they can do is rip
continually at each other's flesh, like angry birds, for all
eternity.

I tell them.

"Very funny," says Mom.

"Cut it out," Dad says.

"We're a little sad sometimes," says Mom. "But we
definitely ain't dead."

"Are we?" Dad says.

Then they get quiet.

"Holy crap," Dad says.

Suddenly they seem to be hearing something from far away.

"Jeez, that's better," Dad says.

"Feels super," Mom says.

"Like you had a terrible crick and then it went away," Dad
says.

"Like your dirty dress you had on for the big party all of a
sudden got clean," says Mom.

They smile, step through the wall, vanish in two little sudden blurps
of light.

Giff's pale and bent, glowing/shimmering, taller than in life, a
weird breeze in his hair that seems to be coming from many directions
at once.

"There is a glory, but not like how I thought," he says. "I
had it all wrong. Mostly wrong. Like my mind was this little basket,
big flood pouring in, but all I got was this hint of greater water?"

"You were always a nice person," I say.

"No, I was not," he says. "Forced my little mini-views
down everybody's throat. Pinched my wife! And now it's so sad.
Because know what he did? Rimney? Typed her a note, like it was from
me, saying I was leaving, due to I didn't love her, due to that Kyle
thing. But that is so not true! I loved her all through that. But
now, rest of her life, she's going to be thinking that of me, that I
left her and the baby, when we were just getting over that pinching
thing."

His eyes fill with tears and his hair stops blowing and he crushes
his pink glasses in his hand.

"Go see her," I say. "Tell her the truth."

"Can't," he says. "You just get one."

"One what?" I say.

"Visitation or whatever?" he says.

I think, So why'd you come here?

He just smiles, kind of sad.

Then the front window implodes and Rimney climbs through with a tire
iron.

"It's going to happen now," Giff says.

And it does. It takes two swings. It doesn't hurt, really, but it's
scary, because it's happening to me, me, me, me, the good boy in
school, the boy who felt lilacs were his special flower, the boy who,
when poor Jean was going, used to sneak off to cry in the closet.

As I go, there's an explosion of what I can only call truth/energy
flood. I can't exactly convey it, because you're still in that
living/limited state, so lucky/unlucky, capable of smelling rain,
rubbing palm against palm, having some new recently met someone
suddenly brighten upon seeing you.

Rimney staggers to the door, unbolts it, stands looking out.

I pass through him and see that even now all his thoughts are of Val,
desperate loving frightened thoughts of how best to keep her safe.

Giff and I cross the yard hand in hand, although like fifteen feet
apart. Where are we going? I have no idea. But we're going there
fast, so fast we're basically skimming along Trowman Street, getting
simultaneously bigger/lighter, and then we're flying, over
Kmart/Costco Plaza, over the width of Wand Lake, over the entire
hilly area north of town.

Below us now is Giff's house: snow on the roof, all the lights on,
pond behind it, moon in the pond.

Giff says/thinks, Will you?

And I say/think, I will.

She's at the table doing bills, red-eyed, the note at her feet, on
the floor. She sees me and drops her pen. Am I naked, am I pale, is
my hair blowing? Yes and yes and yes. I put one bare foot on the
note.

A lie, I say. Elliot's dead, sends his love. Rimney did it. Rimney.
Say it.

Rimney, she says.

That's all the chance I get. The thing that keeps us flying sucks me
out of the house. But as I go I see her face.

Rejoining Giff on high I show him her face. He is glad, and now can
go.

We both can go.

We go.

Snow passes through us, gulls pass through us. Tens of towns,
hundreds of towns stream by below, and we hear their prayers,
grievances, their million signals of loss. Secret doubts shoot up
like tracers, we sample them as we fly through: a woman with a
too-big nose, a man who hasn't closed a sale in months, a kid who's
worn the same stained shirt three days straight, two sisters worried
about a third who keeps saying she wants to die. All this time we
grow in size, in love, the distinction between Giff and me
diminishing, and my last thought before we join something I can only
describe as Nothing-Is-Excluded is, Giff, Giff, please explain, what
made you come back for me?

He doesn't have to speak, I just know, his math emanating from inside
me now: Not coming back, he would only have saved himself. Coming
back, he saved Mom, Dad, me. Going to see Cyndi, I saved him.

And, in this way, more were freed.

That is why I came back. I was wrong in life, limited, shrank
everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something
light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.

The author wishes to thank the Lannan Foundation, the Syracuse
University College of Arts and Sciences, his colleagues and
students in the Syracuse Creative Writing Program and English
Department, and the good people at Riverhead Books, ICM,
The New
Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, McSweeney's,
Red Hour Films, and UltraVinyl Films for their generosity during the
writing of these stories.

He also wishes to thank Paula, Caitlin, and Alena, whose love and
support are constant, boundless, and essential as air.