Or Not to Be (32 page)

The church is hushed. My soul feels
blessed. What is left of me, my antimatter, is truly eternal. At the instant of
the blessing, what remains of me is swooshed into the universe and, with a
blinding light, bursts into cosmic energy.

I don’t depart. I remain at my memorial
service. At the same time, I am everywhere else. I don’t mean everywhere like
all around the world. I mean everywhere in the entirety of infinity. It is both
disorienting and liberating.

Mom was right: dead, I am everywhere and
at all time
. It is impossible to explain. It can
only be imagined until it is experienced.

My husband stands up to speak, and I dread
hearing what he’ll say. The end of my life with him was so painful. We hurt
each other, time after time, every minute of my last months alive. I’m afraid
from his actions, and from the perspective and advice his younger self provided
to me in death, that the man I loved might be incredibly relieved to be rid of
me. How will he manage to talk to this large group without indicating his
pleasure
in
my absence? This is one mystery
that I need to have solved.

He walks to the podium slowly, head down.
He takes some papers from his pocket and unfolds them, clears his throat, and
begins to read.

“As Anna’s husband and best friend, I
would like to take a moment to talk about how special she was to me. My Anna
was a unique and happy person, one whose smile could light up a room. She could
always make me laugh ...”

Boring. He could be talking about a pet
turtle. Someone must have put him up to this—told him he had to speak, so he
just jotted the first trite lines he could come up with. Perhaps he even
Googled “tribute to dead wife.” This hurts.

Mom? Are you watching this?

No response. No “I told you so.”

Eddie drones for a few more minutes and
stops. He looks up at the crowd of people and blinks as though he just realized
they were there. Then, with a rough shake of his head, he crumples the paper.
There you go, Eddie, tell them the truth about us. I think if I had a heart it
would rip in half right now. I was right. Eddie doesn’t love me anymore.

He looks out at the hundreds of people
crowded into the pews. The sniffling teenagers, the men standing in the back,
the chorus sitting on the risers. He looks to Bethany, sitting up so straight,
eyes shiny. Our little boy, leaning his head on his Aunt Michelle’s shoulder, looking
like he might fall asleep. Then Eddie scans the room and his eyes rest on a
teenage boy, about sixteen, in a long black coat in the last row. I follow his
gaze, and at first, I don’t recognize the kid. Then, with a shock, I know him.

He is Pizza Boy.

52

Eddie

After Anna left
for work on her final November eleventh, there was
nothing left for me to do but worry. She was gone. I knew I was going to lose
her. I went to work.

After my morning rotation I needed a
status update to find out whether my wife was still alive. I knew Anna had
lunch duty on Fridays, but I thought maybe I could catch her at the end of it,
before she went to her afternoon classes. I tried her cell phone. No answer. I
called the front office and the head secretary answered in a snit.

“Belleview High School,” she barked.

“Anna Wixim, please.”

“She’s in class right now. Care to leave a
message?”

“No. No message. Just a question. Is
everything all right at the school today?”

“Seems all right to me. What do you mean? Who
is this?” she asked.

“This is Anna’s husband, Eddie Wixim. I
was just a little worried. I wanted to make sure Anna made it to school all
right, and there were no emergencies today.”

“Well, I know Anna’s here, but I didn’t
actually see her. She called down this morning to tell us she was taking her
first class to lab. That’s what those science teachers do, you know. They call
us all day long telling us where they’re going.”

“No emergencies?”

“Like what do you mean?”

I tried to explain without sounding like a
nutcase. “Like fires or intruders or fights on campus—any of those things?”

“Oh, now, Dr. Wixim, we have some of those
things every single day. Today’s no different ...” Her voice trailed off and
sounded like she was covering the mouthpiece, talking to someone else. I heard
her say, “Yes, sir. No, sir. Of course, I’ll call on his walky-talky.” Then
back to me, “Dr. Wixim, you hit it on the head. We have one of your emergencies
right this minute. I have to go help call up all the administrators. I’ll tell
Anna you called.”

“No. Wait!” I yelled into the phone. “What
is the emergency now?”

A voice over her walky-talky came through
the phone before she could cover the mouthpiece: “Gun in the cafeteria.” She
hung up.

Gun in the cafeteria. I froze.

Was Anna still in the cafeteria?

I dialed the school again. Busy. I tried
again for five minutes, then ran out of the hospital and drove like a mad man
to get there. When I arrived fifteen minutes later, I charged into the front
office.

“I need to see Anna Wixim right away,” I
demanded to the secretary at the first desk.

“No sir, we’re not allowing visitors right
now. Lockdown.” She picked up her radio and hissed into it, “Jake? Jake! Get up
here and lock these front doors! Now!”

“Why are you in a lockdown?” I asked, as
every hair on my body stood at attention.

Her radio beeped. She held up her palm to
me while we listened through the static. “Yes, ma’am. I’m on my way.”

Back in charge, she turned to me and said,
“Dr. Wixim, it’s a safety precaution. Everything appears to be okay, and the
police are here, but the lockdown helps keep the kids in their places until we
know it’s safe to change classes again.”

“Just tell me where Anna is right now.”

“Hold on a sec.” She pulled a massive
stack of stapled papers from her bottom desk drawer and started flipping
through them. She glanced at the clock. “Hmm, 11:27, normally she’d be finished
with lunch duty, but I bet she had to stay in the cafeteria until the lockdown
ends.”

“Isn’t that where the gun is?” I was
losing control.

“How’d you know about the gun?”

“Heard it over the phone. That’s why I
came.”

“Yes, sir,” she admitted, “that’s where
the gun was spotted, but the administrators are all there, and they haven’t
confiscated a gun yet.”

Somehow, incredibly, I kept breathing. And
standing. I didn’t pass out, but I was close. I sat down in a chair by her
desk, and she said, “Sir, you look a little pale. Are you feeling all right?”

“No. I think I might be sick.” Then I was
sick into her wastebasket.

Her walky-talky beeped, and a man’s voice
said, “Front office. All clear. No gun in the cafeteria. Call an all-clear
please.”

She sighed and said to me, “See?
Everything is fine. These things blow over fast around here.” She picked up her
walky-talky and said, “All clear, I got it. Thanks. And if there’s a janitor
listening, I need a cleanup in the front office.” She gave a weak smile to me
and a sick look to the stinking trash can.

I was embarrassed. I got up quickly, nodded good-bye, and
got out of there.

53

Anna

What is Pizza Boy doing
at my memorial service? Why isn’t he in jail?

Daddy’s voice says, “Calm down, honey.
You’re not supposed to need a guide anymore after you depart.”

“Daddy, that’s the kid who killed me!
What’s he doing here?” I’m shrieking, bordering on hysteria. The peace I felt
just a few moments ago has vaporized.

“Anna, that boy did not kill you.”

“What? Then why am I dead?”

“Well, consider it. Of course your
space-time gap opened up on November eleventh. You left your atoms behind and
passed through. That could have happened at any time of the day.”

“And it did happen,” I say, “right on
time. Pizza Boy had a gun in the cafeteria and shot me, and I died at 11:11 on
11/11.”

Daddy sighs. “It looks like we need to do
a little time traveling to help you clarify your deathday.”

So, Daddy takes me to November eleventh.
He plops me into lunch duty at eleven o’clock on the final day of my life.

Rewind. Replay.

The cafeteria fills quickly with noisy,
hungry, hormonal teenagers. Dreaded Friday Lunch Duty: Four hundred kids, one
administrator, four grumpy lunch ladies, twenty-two minutes, not enough
ibuprofen, and me. A deadly mix.

At the pizza line, as usual, the skinny
mobster is trying to buy pizza with his free tax dollars. After the lunch lady
denies him this forbidden pleasure, he has the nerve to argue with her, so I
offer my assistance.

He says, “What? Are you the Walmart
greeter or something?”

I order him to go to the
turkey-and-mashed-potato-entrée line.

“But I don’t want no turkey on my tray. I
want pizza!” he demands.

“That’s your misfortune. Come with me now,
or I’ll call the resource officer to escort you out of the building.”

He takes a stand and blatantly threatens
me, warning about gangs and guns in the school.

“I don’t care if you have a gun,” I reply,
aware that my mouth is talking again without consulting my mind. “If you don’t
have money, you may not have pizza. Even if you have a gun, without money, your
only lunch option is the turkey. Now,
move
!”

He drops the tray of pizza on the floor and
storms away.

Seventeen minutes to go. Time crawls by.

I block my door to keep kids in or out.

I break up a girl fight.

On my way back across the cafeteria, I
hear the growing rumble, the bubbling up of fear, the screaming. The panic on
the faces of the children stuns me. Then I hear, “Gun! He’s got a gun!” and
crowds of kids all run wildly for the door.

I don’t see anyone with a gun as I stand
in the center of the cafeteria while waves of kids run past me. Then I spot my
pizza-not-turkey boy, and he is walking fast. Right toward me.

“This is it, Daddy. It’s 11:11. This is
when he shoots me!”

“No, Anna. Keep watching.” Daddy is calm
and certain. I am horrified to watch the details of my death, but I look back.

Pizza Boy walks straight toward me. I stop
him and ask, “Hey, the kids saw someone with a gun. Did you?”

He looks right into my eyes and says, “No,
ma’am, I didn’t see anyone with a gun.”

I say, “Well, hurry. Come with me, and
we’ll get you out before whoever it is gets in here.” I take his arm and pull
him toward the other door. I lead him and more scared kids into the library and
push them under tables. “Code red,” I tell them. “Remember? It’s the hiding
drill. Stay quiet. We’ll tell you when to come out.” They all huddle together.
The nasty, flirty freshmen girls, the two Goths, and my Pizza Boy. They are all
just scared kids.

What the hell? “Daddy, he didn’t shoot
me.”

“No, Anna. If you think back, you’ll
remember the gun kid went out the back door of the school when he was spotted
and made a run for it. He drove off campus and was arrested later that day at a
gas station.”

I do remember now. We closed school early.
I got home at around one o’clock. The house was quiet and empty. I was a little
freaked out, but antsy. I almost called Eddie to tell him about the excitement
at school, but I remembered, just in time, that he was a horse’s ass, so I
couldn’t make myself voluntarily speak to him. Finally, I settled down enough
and realized it was a perfect day to run. I figured that would calm me down.

It was a crisp, fall day with an endless
deep blue sky. Just like the day when I was a baby and Mom took me for a walk
and later Molly chomped my arm. Just like the day I left Bethany’s soccer game
and got into the car wreck that totaled my van. Just like my other deathdays, a
perfect, sunny November day. I see that now. I had no idea of it then.

“Daddy? Did something happen while I was
running? Was I hit by a car on the church hill? The road is so narrow there,
and the cars whiz by so fast.”

“No. You weren’t hit by a car. But you did
die on that run, Anna. Do you want me to just tell you about it, or do you want
to see it?”

“I died running?” That’s so ironic that
it’s almost comical. My entire body and mind churned at high speed when I ran.
My thoughts and body were in harmony. My matter and antimatter practically
hummed with life. “I don’t know if I want to see it. Did I have a heart
attack?”