the expense of activating them, meant that access to a telemort was limited and expensive. So it was mostly constituents who could afford a telemort session. Some subs—Al was one of them—saved for years for a fifteen-minute opportunity to communicate with a deceased loved one.
However precious the resources spent, what the telemort users got for their money was a chance to sit at a computer keyboard high in the sky, behind floor-to-ceiling glass facing out over the apparently endless expanse of Lake Michigan. They typed a few sentences and, assisted by a technician, launched them into the ether. Then they waited for a response to be displayed, trailing behind a cursor blinking on the bathtub-sized monitor mounted in the floor just beyond their keyboard. It could be a lone individual staring down at the monitor. But many times it was an entire family, semi-circled around the monitor, holding their breath and hoping Grandpa or Grandma had greetings from the great beyond.
Sometimes no response appeared. (No refunds: you paid for the opportunity only to attempt communication.) Sometimes a response would furl out across the screen in a language unknown to the family watching over the monitor—English-speakers, for example, might witness a few sentences instantiated in Arabic or Mandarin. (These could be translated upon payment of an additional charge.) Very occasionally the response was entirely straightforward and representative of the nether communicator’s style when he or she walked among the living. A deceased dyspeptic might complain, “Shit, I’m still tired.” A skinflint auntie might reveal: “The bonds are buried thirty-five steps west of the chicken coop. Cash ONLY IF NEEDED.” Most often the messages were cryptic, vague, or allusive, as in: “Make hay while the tide’s out” or “Light, light, light . . .” or “It ain’t so hot here” or “Dante was close.”
At its inception, the telemort had been hailed as the invention that would end all religious and philosophical mysteries. It would determine whether or not there was life after death and, if so, its exact nature. Poke McNearland correctly predicted this would not be the case. “Look,” he said. “Any message, even if it is a bona fide message from the dead, is still a message. It has to be interpreted. And where there’s room for interpretin’, there’s room for arguin’.” So, beyond basic questions of whether or not the telemort was a hoax and a con, various telemorted communiqués that were rapidly published were just as rapidly debated. One of the first published messages read, “Purge tory.” While some insisted this was an anathema on all Anglophilic conservatives, others said it was a locational remark from a bad Catholic who couldn’t spell. When telemort monitors remained blank, atheistic materialists said, “I told you so.” When an ellipses blinked across a screen (“. . .”), some Buddhists said it indicated the perfect dispassion of Nirvana, certain Hindus claimed it hinted that humans are drops in the vast ocean of being, and mystically inclined mathematicians said it represented infinity.
The double-jointed, circus-contortionist flexibility of language—even language ostensibly employed by the dead—was proven especially by the emergence of anagrammarians. Set up in storefronts and sidewalk booths in the vicinity of the skyscraper housing the telemort machinery, anagrammarians accepted fees to decipher the true (or at least more satisfying) meanings of freshly received telemort texts that were baffling or discouraging. A couple of sisters communing with their late mother were crushed to find her apparently as misanthropic in death as she had been in life. “Assholes leftover,” her telemort text grumped. But an anagrammarian, assuring them their mother really had mellowed and grown altruistic in her post-mortem sojourn, re-sorted the letters of the message to divine the magnanimous maternal command, “Love others as self.” A telemorting nephew considered himself much poorer in cash but no richer in wisdom after a late uncle texted “Bongo odd gut.” Actually a profound theological affirmation, “No God but God,” advised an enterprising anagrammarian. A newly married couple sought vocational advice from a beloved, gone-but-not-forgotten professor. “Gauge my wontons,” replied the sagacious professor from his grave. Were they supposed to open a Chinese restaurant, featuring very accurately sized dumplings? This though neither had culinary expertise beyond egg scrambling, nor a predilection for precision? They drifted aimlessly and disconsolately for days, until a consulted anagrammarian disclosed the true meaning: “Go west, young man.” Then they cheerfully packed for a move to Old California.
At this juncture in his ruminations, Albert arrived at his home. He stepped from the sidewalk onto the grass fronting the Church of St. Brendan the Wanderer. He leaned his wiry figure against the frame supporting the church sign. He looked up into the black sky punctured by the light of scattered stars. At the moment the stars appeared disarrayed, separate, each alone in a crowd. The skein of thoughts spooling through Al’s mind unwound in a jumble of impressions about the telemort, about death and life and any communion there might be between the two. He felt a bit drunk. He cocked his head back and shouted into the silence, “Bongo odd gut!” He waited for a reply.
Then he took a few deep breaths and cleared his skull. He evenly climbed the stairs to the door opening into his apartment. Before he reached for the knob he saw an envelope taped to the door. “Albert—URGENT” was written on the outside of the envelope. He immediately recognized his mother’s handwriting. She was not a woman given to dramatic flourishes. Al tore the message off the door and scrambled inside. In seconds he had a lantern aglow. Still on his feet, he read:
Dear Albert: I did not find you at home. Please come to me tomorrow. In light of recent events, I have much to tell you. To be honest, I have something to tell you and much to explain. Don’t be anxious, I don’t mean to alarm you. But we need to talk.
Now as always, with love, Mother
As his heartbeat accelerated, Al chuckled. Whatever was to be made about the veracity and meaning of telemort texts, there was no doubt about this message. He had a sense that his life was about to change, radically, irrevocably. He looked back at the door and saw that he had left it wide open.
4
He touched Val the first time they met. It was a January morning. Snow blanketed the ground, its stunning whiteness broken only here and there, by the russet yellow ribbons of dog markings. Ice encased trees. When glittering limbs clattered in the wind, the air echoed with a sound like tackle tinkling against the aluminum masts of harbored yachts. He was on an errand and tried to hustle. But the sidewalks and streets were treacherously slick, so slick it seemed that if you fell you might slide clear off the face of the earth. These conditions forced him into a halting, uneven gait, with his arms spasming out for balance each time he slipped. Which he did frequently. Still, he was not self-conscious until he was six or seven blocks from his home and saw her stepping onto the front stoop of a brick bungalow.
She wore woolen pants and a white, waist-length down coat. Her brunette hair flowed luxuriously out from under a red and yellow striped stocking cap. It was the hair he noticed first. Then he took in her long legs. Suddenly he caught himself trying to walk normally, at a casual gait with his hands relaxed at his hips. You idiot, he thought. You’re twenty-five years old, not a middle schooler who’s just realizing it might be more rewarding to impress girls than pester them. They nearly intersected as she attained the sidewalk. Then she surged ahead of him at a quick pace that would have been natural and sustainable on dry ground. He knew how slippery the surface was, and that she operated unawares. He stretched strides to close the distance between them, trying to imagine how he might tactfully suggest that she slow down and take care. He was nearly even with her elbow when one leg jackknifed out from under her. She tipped backward and righted herself, barely, with a jerking forward over-correction. Now her feet scooted backward and she began to fall facedown. He got a grip on her churning elbow and pulled her up straight. In the instant that she recovered her footing, he lost his. Levering her upright rocked him off balance. His feet flung forward as if they were taking flight from the rest of his body. Instantaneously, without time even to flail, he was on his back.
She looked down at him with wide-open green eyes, gasping alluringly feminine sounds of concern and alarm. At impact his cap had shot off his head like cannon-fire. He lay below her bareheaded, his feet still held off the ground. His body was unhurt; his pride, decimated. Ridiculous figure that he was, what had he to lose now? His spirit felt buoyant, unbound from the merciless gravity that had thrown him on his back. A smile rose to his lips. He looked her