Mme Rimbaud got a new haircut. Une coupe nouvelle. It isn't as good as the old haircut. It has no puff, no coiffed look. Someone needs to floof it.
Mme Rimbaud lives in her afterlife wearing her usual make-up and a long necklace. On some afternoons she reapplies her lipstick. She is one of the few Afterlifers in her milieu walking around of her own accord. She stands stiff and upright, like an overseer, retaining her formidable attitude. Using a straight cane, she circles the hallways, looking ready to contend with emergent problems. But if you smile at her she smiles back. Don't be intimidated.
Sometimes Mme Rimbaud encounters A.D., and they'll stop for a chat. Afterlifer A.D. is another walker and a talker. He looks you in the eye and reaches out his hands. He’s always walking up to you and touching your arm, your waist, your wrist, your head. When a visitor walked in this afternoon wearing a ladybug brooch on her coat, pinned on the lapel under her shoulder, he started fondling it, while Mme Rimbaud stood by firmly, overseeing.
Most of the Afterlifers here don't move around much. Some are mute. Even the ones who aren't don't have much to say. Except for the rooster lady.
The rooster lady is almost always sitting or reclining in her moveable chair frowning with her mouth open. While everyone else is slumped, dozing or staring quietly at the TV or the floor, she periodically shouts. Often there are no words, just noises that sound like a broken tool or a troubled bird. Sometimes she will shriek with urgency "Secours! Secours!" or "Gendarmes! Gendarmes!” Her noises are always repeated, never just once, sometimes more than twice. Yesterday after lunch she sat with everyone else in the TV room and really sounded the alarm, shouting "Fatiguée! Fatiguéeeee! Tout le monde est faaa-ti-guéeeee!" Everyone ignored her. They usually do. My dad was right next to her. As if it had been a distant sound he couldn't interpret instead of a shriek coming from someone only inches away, he asked “What was that?" By the next moment, before I could answer, he had forgotten all about it.
The Afterlifers prove the existence of ghosts. You may not need any proof, or you may think you don't believe in ghosts. But it isn't mysterious. There's no need for superstition, and no need to avoid it. The Afterlife comes before death as we usually think of it - that ritualized locus of incomprehension and pain. I can’t speak to the state of the Afterlifers once they pass through that particular spotlight. My guess is they'll remain ghosts. What’s certain is that you won't see them in the same way you can now.
You can see them now, if you want to. You can also see what they see, up to a point, and start to understand which things stand out to them and which things don't mean anything at all. They will want to sit down, but even when facing a row of chairs they will still wonder where they can sit. As far as they can see, there are some things, but whatever they are, they don't indicate the possibility of taking a seat. You can suggest optimistically, "How about - right here? We can sit in this chair," and a cheerful Afterlifer will say "Great!" But this exchange won't mobilize any sitting. The word "chair" will sound familiar to them, but it won't make any actual chair stand out as a place to rest.
This kind of situation is not hard to navigate. You have to enter the Afterlife through bodily contact, and treat vision and words as decorative niceties, part of a purely aesthetic realm devoted to camaraderie. Gently place their hand on the armrest or seat and ease them downward, so they can feel their weight supported. Anything that for a few consecutive short moments causes this feeling becomes a "chair." In other words, in the Afterlife, chairs as we Midlifers see them do not exist. But so what? Afterlifers can sit down. They sit still on chairs all the time. A.D. often drags one along behind him.
Afterlifers are ghosts manifesting their mismatch between habit and circumstance. They fill some moments with gestures that predate or have outlived their objects. At morning snacktime, A.D. drank his chocolate-flavored protein out of a small plastic bottle, handling it like a delicate champagne glass. A bit earlier, I saw him move his hand toward his face several times, tilting it toward his mouth, then lowering it again. The bottle was optional - his grip followed the same path whether he was holding it or not. A half-hour later he took a few more sips from the phantom bottle, courtesy of his empty hand.
Some of the Afterlifers' mismatches generate lingering animals that crawl into a conversation and make themselves at home as grammatical objects. Yesterday I brought my dad a metal elephant from his old office, and he seemed to like feeling its heft. "Wow!", he said when I first put it in his hand. "To think that there's an elephant in the room!" Biting into a roll at lunchtime he said, "Mmm. I think there are elephants in this bread." A few hours later, while we were outside in the sun, he asked me, "What is your opinion of elephants?" I said they can turn up in unexpected places, and that can be useful. "Youthful." he said. "True."
Here's what's hard to figure out: for each Afterlifer, which things that happened earlier in the day are still present by the afternoon? Afterlifers zig-zag their way through time. The poet says: “All life death does end, and each day dies with sleep.” Undeniable. But an Afterlifer's day has no division into epochs. By early evening, some of the things that happened in the morning may still hang around their consciousness like an echo or a leftover vibe, as if the morning was just a moment ago. Leftover feelings in the Afterlife don't follow the same trajectory as they do for us Midlifers, when a sense of warmth you find near your throat after you say goodbye to a person who has just been very kind to you keeps kindling from the farewell until the feeling fades, or until it is supplanted by a next thing. Some Midlifer-leftover feelings take too long to fade, such as lasting anger that leaves us ready to infuse irritation or resentment into interactions that don't deserve them. If only such momentum could be broken. But Afterlifers' leftovers have no steady momentum. Their emotional residue can pop up at any time. They live through their feelings in patchy, interrupted slow-motion. Watch out, because you don't know what they might do, out of the blue.
When I arrived this morning I found A.D. standing behind the rooster lady’s chair with his hand clamped over her mouth. With eyes open, she was in some kind of somnolent state. She wasn’t making any noise. But to A.D., it might have seemed as if she had just been shouting a moment ago, or perhaps that she was even shouting right then. He was having what we Midlifers would consider some sort of delayed reaction. Worried that rooster lady might suffocate, I asked nervously "A.D., what are you doing?", offering him my arms. But he kept his hand steadily covering her mouth, standing still as the other Afterlifers went about their business. Some of them looked at the scene, but who knows what they saw. The rooster lady wasn't reacting. Maybe, like A.D., she was in one of those illusory Nows, where it wasn't happening. To my relief I saw her breathing. She might shout about it tomorrow, when she calls for the gendarmes.
"You know what everyone around here is talking about?" my dad asked me, grinning, when I walked into his room around 4pm. "The... what's-it-called. What do you call it?” A pause. “The morning!"
*
I bring my dad a quadripod cane. It is covered in butterflies. Swirls of metallic pinks and yellows rise from four rubber feet to its sturdy gooseneck handle. I want to walk together the way we used to.
"Let's put on your shoes, Dad".
"Do I want to choose bad?”
"No, your shoes. I'll choose your shoes." I point to a pile of them under the desk. "See? That's where all your shoes are. Those things are shoes."
"Yes but none of them work."
"Hm, you think? Let's see."
I place two sturdy shoes on the wheelchair’s metal flaps and gently ease his feet inside as he gazes out the window. “Voila koala! Ready, Dad?”
He points at his feet. "This isn’t a great machine because it only goes one direction."
"Let's stand up, Dad." I move the walker in front of him. If he can rise using the walker using both hands, we can more easily switch to the cane once he is standing.
"Okay, sweetie!" he says, grabbing onto the arm of his chair. Standing up never works when he grips the chair. He needs to lean on something once his center of gravity lifts. Something higher up in front of him that he can push against, to help him balance.
"Here, put your hand on this black thing," I say pointing with my chin as I try to transfer his grip onto the handle of the walker. There's no point in calling it a handle or a walker - he'll think I'm talking about an anvil or a rocker. As I put my hand on his he says cheerfully "Okay!", but his fingers tighten even harder around the armrest. I pry them off, but this makes him feel imbalanced, and he steadies himself by re-tightening his grip. We are stuck.
There's an antiquated compact-disc player on the shelf and I put in a CD of Mahalia Jackson. Her wavy melismas fill the room with minor-key determination. On my way! Canaan-land. She is dead-serious. On my way...well well well .... Canaan-land!
"Dad did you know Canaan-land in the song is Canada?" Glory hallelujah! Canaan-land. "Destination of the underground railroad."
"Does this cane go to the railroad? Haven't seen one of those in a while," he says.
"Look, here's a train track." I hold my forearm in between the handles of his walker. "Wanna feel it?" He squeezes it and I flex my muscle. With my other hand under his tricep I try to lift him. "We can ride the train, Dad. Let’s try to go this way.”
“Is that way haywire?”
“Maybe, but it’s just the hallway.”
“We’re on the highway?”
Under the shine of Queen Mahalia, he rises. His hands relax. I put them on the walker handles. I'm falling and rising...Canaan land. We're moving! I hang the cane over my train-track arm.
"The train goes this way" I say, leading him out of his room into the hallway as Ms. Mahalia's voice fades. "I'm following you," he says happily. He doesn't seem to notice that the walker is gone. For the first time in weeks, he is upright, balanced, and walking.
“Great job, Dad!”
“What surprises me is me. I do things I didn’t think I could do. But with this particular helicopter, I can do it.”
I ask: Wanna hear a poem? He always says yes. “For any ruffian in the sky...”, I begin. By the end of the hallway we reach the last stanza:
true to his mate, his chicks, his friends
he loves because he cannot fear
(you see it in the way he stands
and looks and leaps upon the air)
Turning the corner we find ourselves facing Mme Rimbaud’s planted cane and dire demeanor. I sing: “BonJour Mme Rimbaud!” and suddenly she is beaming. “Oooh, doesn’t she look maaaarvelous today!” says my father, forming an O with his mouth. Without teetering, buoyed by butterflies, he brings Mme Rimbaud’s free hand to his lips. The butterflies turn into kisses sputtering small squeezing noises at the base of her fingers while she rolls her eyes, head titled and swaying slightly. She is frowning like a sarcastic teenager.
“Let’s go on the patio, Dad.”
The butterflies return to the cane as we wobble toward the courtyard.
“How many daughters does she have?” my dad asks once we are outside.
“Hmm, I’m not sure.” I always thought of Mme Rimbaud as a mother of sons.
“What do you do with daughters?”
He answers his own question.
“Daughters should be...what do you call it. A thing in themselves.”
“You have three daughters. A good supply.”
“Really?”
“Yes, three completely different daughters,” I say, thinking of our distribution over temperament, continent, and class. “You hit a lot of points on the spectrum of humanity.”
He laughs. “That’s just what I need. More specters of humanity.”
Now we are both laughing.
“You’re good at being old, Dad.”
“Old! I never know what that is or when it is. How old am I?”
“Eighty-seven.”
“Eighty-seven! Wow. That’s pretty old! Don't forget to tell my daughters I’m a very old man.”
*
I like to get to the Afterlife by walking. The transition from Midlife isn't bad. Midlifery anchors us to what we unthinkingly recognize in a passing flow - cool shoes! - there goes a motor-scooter in the bike lane - a corgi!, and so on. In our thoughts we can hear what these things are called. But enter the Afterlifers' dwellings and you drop into a reserve of semantic liberty, swirling with contingencies of meaning. Even though you can move around and talk with the Afterlifers - and I recommend you do - it's up for grabs whether they will see what you see and hear what you hear. They will never argue about what a word means or whether something is or isn't a toothbrush. If you say something simple at 10am like "Here, have a banana", by 10:05 the banana might well become a bandaid, and by 10:15 it may be a bandana. Their ease with words and categories reminds me of those dreams where a single thing is at once a toothbrush and a doorknob, moveable and stationary, or where a person is both your baby nephew and your grandmother, and the dreamer finds these dualities unremarkable. That's how the Afterlifers treat the banana-bandaid-bandana. No instability or confusion enters the picture. So leave the house and walk for a while, traverse different neighborhoods, cross a bridge, go under the railroad tracks, follow the boulevard and turn right into the Afterlife - a new land, dense with potential.
If you're lucky, you'll find an Afterlifer accustomed to telling you what they see and how they feel about it. You need someone who didn't spend their Midlife on the lookout for situations that need correcting. Someone sociable enough to enjoy micro-interactions with the public, extroverted enough to go looking for them, and confessional enough to love talking about people behind their backs. If their body takes them to the Afterlife, whether or not they're one of the walkers, they'll definitely be one of the talkers. "I don't mind doing one thing rather than another thing," my dad explained early on in his Afterlife. "But what I don't understand is all this not understanding."
I once read in a textbook: Man is an animal. I in particular am a cannibal, when it comes to my father's perceptions. Something orients me toward trying to experience what he experiences. It was always like this, and by now he has grown used to our communion. Last week I told my dad how long I’d be staying with him – ten days. "I want to go with you to a Tuesday," he said.
*
Whatever else you do in the Afterlife, do not have lunch. Over the seedy eyes of today's round sliced cucumbers, someone has poured a thick cataract. My perceptual cannibalism breaks down when I can't experience food the way the Afterlifers do. They think those gherkins are something to eat. But they're sticky and tasteless - don't put them in your mouth.
At lunch the only things I eat are perceptions. The cucumbers stare at me with their eyes glazed over. My dad discovers the bread roll on his small plate. Unable to recognize it as bread, he tenderly tests it with his knife to see (by feeling) if it is butter. Finding that it doesn't yield as butter would, he breaks it in half, then reaches for the identical small plate next to his - in case the item on it is what he's looking for. He uses the same gesture to test its texture gently with the knife. It resists. It's bread. He breaks it in half, and now has two broken rolls on two small plates, and resumes his butter search, which yields another plate of maybe-butter-but-really-bread from the other direction. Eventually all the small bread plates on the table have gravitated to my father, beloved, bread-rich, and butterless, and there is nothing left for him to mistake for that soft substance he so regularly reached for over a lifetime. "Excuse me," he says to the person walking by, who turns out to be Mme Mirabeau. "Could we have some..." and the momentum runs out, as it often does, so he starts again: "...Is there any..." I mutter "butter" exactly when my dad lands on "bread?" Mme Mirabeau pauses at our table, as she is also trying to locate something. She shows me a paper on which she has written in careful handwriting the name of a parfumerie and a telephone number. But she doesn't have the address. Enunciating carefully, looking back and forth between my eyes and her paper, she points to the name and number, and asks if I know the address, and if not could I please find it, because she doesn't have it. The parfumerie. She needs the address. Could I please tell her where it is.
You may dwell anxiously on unfathomable endings, and what they may or may not show about the timelines they terminate. The lines that worry you go straight from your midlife-Now to the future, where a significant endpoint sits invisibly on an unknown segment ahead. But the zig-zag Afterlife lacks the sense of past time accumulating. You can disrupt the entire feeling of linear structure if you become a cannibal of perceptions!
*
I find it hard to leave. The real kicker is the transition in the other direction, back to Midlife. It's at least as disorienting as the much-discussed Transition that cannibalism frees you from worrying about.
“I’m going home now, Dad, but I’ll see you next time.” I have activated a nest of subroutines in my father.
“Are you taking our car?” he asked.
He hasn’t owned a car in decades.
“No, I think I’ll take the metro.”
“Okay well don’t forget your helmet.
“Don’t worry, I never ride without a helmet.”
“Ok sweetie, so, you’re taking your bicycle, then we meet at seven, you drive to Minneapolis and I go to Memphis, and we meet for dinner when we get there. Will you have your car with you?”
All my vehicles are on the other side of the Atlantic, in my garage.
“I didn’t bring my bike, it’s at home.”
“Okay so tonight we all have dinner together, and then tomorrow, we’ll put it all back, I mean on Sunday, that is, Saturday. I’ll come pick you up. But be careful, sweetie, and I mean it.”
“Don’t worry Dad, I’ll be careful.”
“So then the plan is, tonight, we meet there, then go to the movies. What should we see?”
“How about if we just go to the Luxor and first see the movie in auditorium A, and when it’s done, walk to auditorium B and see whatever’s playing there.”
“Grrrrrrreat idea.” He smiles, the anxious sheen swept away. He always liked making plans. “Should I give you some money?” He reaches for his pocket, but can’t get his hand inside.
“That’s okay, I have money.”
Now he is alarmed. “I don’t have any money! I’m completely broke!”
“I have your money, Dad.”
“Really?”
“I have some of it, my sisters have some of it. We aren’t keeping it from you, we’re keeping it for you,” I try to explain. “Were you worried about not having money? I can see why you’d be worried if you thought you were broke. But you’re not broke.”
I reach into my bag to show him my card wallet but my French mini-dictionary comes out instead.
“Look, Dad. I took this from your office.”
He seems to know what it is.
“The advantage with that is you get crammed in the woodwords.”
“The good words?” I ask.
“Those too.” He continues:
“You need to find adverbs that bring you some money. I like money. Maybe if there’s time this afternoon we can look into it.”
“Let’s. I’m going back now, Dad. I don’t need any money, and neither do you.”
“I don’t have much, but we don’t need much. We can just walk around here and if we want to buy books or something, we can.”
“We can. Okay good-bye Dad.”
“Good-bye sweetie”, he says softly, thanking me with his eyes. Blinking slowly, his neck loosens, chin drops to his chest. He’s asleep. Rooster lady is singing a mellow tune, each word a two-syllable sparrow-song: “Secours! Secours!”
I carry his hypnogogic consciousness out of the Afterlifers’ designated building. I am dazed and dissolved, not by the thought of looming endpoints, but by a confusing illegible present. A shaky translucent layer has dropped between me and the buzzing Midlifer-world, like a glum, gummy shower curtain that moves with me as I go. Its ripples leave me not quite sure where anything stands, what sounds mean, whether anyone speaking is speaking to me, or how to react if they are. Don’t ask me for directions.
Walking back to Midlife in twilight, my footsteps make no noise. All I hear is street traffic and wind. While the wind rustles, the bus groans - two inchoates in conversation. What does the bus ask the wind? I try to grasp how the wind answers, but can’t discern what it says. A poster torn off a cement wall has left its residue in the rough shape of an elephant.
The neighborhood’s streets are named for Rousseau. My favorite is: rue du Contrat Sociale. I need the reassurance. All those meals full of Afterlifer-experience have brought on perceptual indigestion. In place of eyes I now have two sets of slippery eye-seeds from protracted cucumber vision, each seed ready to see something different, delivering a whirl of what things might be, instead of a vision of what they are. The wisteria looks like ghosts of grapes. Across the Seine, at the Communist Party office in Clichy, the red hammer on a sign as old as an Afterlifer could be a toothbrush. My only guide to how things are are my best guesses. If you spend enough time in these interstices between appearances and reality, you stop caring what things are, or what they're called.
I stay on noisy streets where no one will hear if I bellow words that belong together. A sporty fellow bounces by. Here comes a coral handbag, gold buckle locked under the elbow of a future Mme Rimbaud. Sounding like rooster-lady redux, I summon the poet, announcing dramatically: “Earliest stars, earl-stars, stars principal overbend us! ... Our evening is over us! Our night whelms, whelms, and will end us!” Midlifer-equivalents of drowsy, indifferent Afterlifers, they continue on.
