CHAPTER ONE

Mere hours ago, he was Charlie Gordon, former big shot business owner, occasional husband, father, soon to be grandfather, elder brother and, when it suited his purposes, sometime friend in that order. His goal in life was to make the Forbe’s 500 by the age of sixty-two. He was only a couple of million away. Last night, when he was still Charlie in the flesh, he fell asleep next to his wife in the bed they’d shared for the last twenty-some years.

Before he nodded off Maxine, wearing those blousy flannel nightgowns he hated, her hair in a net to preserve her last hair appointment, looking like a minstrel with a layer of rejuvenating cream on her face read a chapter from a book; and he worked a crossword puzzle, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose like Father Goose. It was nice. As recent as a few short weeks ago they didn’t do things like that—didn’t have the time. That is to say, he didn’t have the time. Most nights, Maxine was already asleep when he arrived home from work, where upon he would crash on the Murphy bed in the den so he wouldn’t wake her. He was considerate. You had to give him that.

He was recovering from surgery--playing word games in bed while Maxine read her book club novel. Sitting up in the bed like this working word puzzles next to his wife or perusing the Financial Times on the porch swing while she sketched flowers with colored pencils was about as much activity as he could manage at that point in his recovery. But he didn’t complain. He wasn’t even bored. He thought he’d be bored!

He used to say to her, “How can you sit there on that swing all day?” (It seemed like such a waste of time, you know.) But it wasn’t fair—his saying that. Of course she didn’t just sit on that swing all day long. She did other things too. He knew that. She kept him in clean clothes, she shopped for groceries, she cooked supper and once a week she ran the vacuum, Swiffered the furniture and changed the sheets on their bed. And twice a month, she did volunteer work at the hospital; (he’d almost forgotten that.) But still, when he tallied up the minutes it would reasonably take to complete those tasks, then subtracted the sum from the hours in a day, it left her plenty of idle time to sit on that swing and sketch flowers. Her pictures filled half a drawer in the credenza.

“What are you going to do with those sketches anyway?” he asked her. “Sell them on consignment to a gift store or at a booth in a craft fair? Or maybe Ebay,” he suggested.

They were quite good. He could fathom her getting some return for her efforts if she was willing to put them out there. He figured people might pay as much as $8.00 a sketch. They were small. Most of them five by eight inch renderings. He crunched the numbers. Say she sold fifty of them; she’d make $400.00. Not that they needed the money, mind you; but sketching flowers just for the heck of it seemed so useless to him, although he knew that sometimes she gave them as gifts—made them into greeting cards—birthday and get well wishes.

“No,” she answered. “I am just going to sit here and look at them.”

The swing was a present he’d given her ten years ago on her fortieth birthday. It’s what she’d asked for. Not a pair of diamond earrings or a mink stole—he would have gladly given her these, but a cheesy, cheap little swing with a sun canopy. She’d seen it at Home Depot for $149.00—an end-of-the-season special. He didn’t get her that one—what would people think? Instead he purchased the deluxe model for $600.00. It was much larger and sturdier and could be made into a bed by dropping the back of the seat. Up until three weeks ago, he’d never sat on that swing. After his surgery though, they spent a couple of hours on it every afternoon.

The prognosis going in had been grim. The ultrasound showed a mass the length and width of a Vlasic pickle.

“Tumor’s discovered that late in the game have usually metastasized,” said the oncologist.

Charlie had ignored the rather copious blood he’d noticed in his stool that day. He thought it was his hemorrhoids. Maxine urged him to get a colonoscopy just to be sure, but the idea of someone sticking a hose with a camera up his A-hole didn't strike him as a good way to spend a morning, thank you very much. (Also, he pictured a much larger camera.) Whenever he thought about that camera, his sphincters seized up. He wouldn’t shit for a week straight; and when he finally could, it felt like he was passing a

Volkswagen. It turned out that camera was the approximate size of a multivitamin capsule or, more accurately, a suppository. He should have had the screening sooner—much sooner.

When the oncologist laid him open, he fully expected to find nodules in his lungs, liver, kidneys and pancreas—the terminal, advanced stage for that kind of cancer—for any kind of cancer for that matter. After the operation, the surgeon ducked his head around the door of his expensive, private hospital suite and said, “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, Charlie.”

To which Charlie replied, “I didn’t even know you knew my mother.”

The surgeon missed the quip—maybe on purpose.

“The mass was contained,” he said. “I only had to remove about eleven inches of your poop shoot. It was in the lower part of your colon, close to your rectum; I didn’t even have to hook you up with a bag. Most assholes with tumors that size aren’t so fortunate.”

Then because Charlie was otherwise hale and hearty, the doctor predicted, providing he showed up for his annual rotor rooters, that he’d live another thirty years. Of course he was relieved beyond measure and ecstatic to hear the good news. He knew he’d dodged a very big bullet—more like a grenade or a missile. He understood for the first time that he wasn’t any better than the next guy—that he wasn’t invincible despite his providential genes—that money couldn’t buy everything.

That was his epiphany….that he wasn’t invincible—that he might not live forever. There hadn’t been cancer, heart disease or strokes on either side for as long as you could trace his family’s history. All of his ancestors, barring Uncle Mel who’d stepped in front of an armored truck while reading the Wall Street Journal, had lived well into their nineties. Before he’d gotten his wakeup call, Charlie had counted on that legacy of longevity.

When he was discharged from the hospital, when he was able to stop taking the pain medication and the fog in his brain had cleared, he borrowed several sheets of Maxine’s lavender scented stationery and began to list the things they would do now that he’d decided to sell his business and retire. He might have had an epiphany, but he was still a list maker. Old habits die hard. The word ‘spontaneous’ does not appear on his resume.

The last thing he said to Maxine mere hours ago when she was reading that book and he was working that puzzle was, “What’s a four-letter word for ‘finished?’”

Maxine couldn’t come up with it. Soon after, she marked her book with the wrapper from a Hershey’s Almond Bar, set Oprah’s book-club pick on her bedside table and switched off her reading lamp. He worked the puzzle for a few more minutes—never coming up with the right word, then turned out his light as well, drifting off to sleep, his mind on the things he’d listed on that sheet of stationery—things he would do now that he’d decided to retire.

Ending up here wasn’t one of them.

The means by which he arrived here is not important, but Charlie would say it was like a beluga whale being sucked through an impossibly narrow straw crushing bone, skin and entrails until only excrement and a fine mist escaped from the end of the straw. It was how he imagined a person might travel through a miniscule wormhole in space or how, with the final excruciating contraction, an infant might shoot from the womb except, of course, the infant would arrive intact at the beginning not the end of his or her journey.

In retrospect, it could have been an unconscious awareness that an embolism congealed in an artery of Charlie’s leg during his sedentary post surgery days, had let loose and was racing toward his heart. That’s what he got for all those idle, nonproductive hours spent on that swing with Maxine he thought. That’s what he got for taking time to smell the flowers.

There is some consolation in the fact that he is not the only Thooop here, not by a long shot, which lends credence to the adage that “misery loves company.” There are countless others milling about in coweled robes, alternately emerging and receding like gray otters swimming beneath the surface of a murky pond. They are indistinguishable from one another. In their hooded robes, their shoulders are slumped as though pressed by a heavy burden, their absent faces are in shadow.

In the eerie distance, there are song lyrics that play from time to time—a boy’s choir singing theme music to the individual stories of their lives. Bridge over Troubled Waters, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, Tell Laura I Love Her, Yesterday, Teen Angel, Bobby Magee… mostly songs from the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties before head banger music when you could still make out the lyrics. They can’t see them, but their soprano voices are as pure and lyrical as the notes on a single flute. There’s been conjecture that the voices belong to deceased members of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Sometimes Charlie’s heart swells with joyous sadness to hear them.

When the robed apparitions happen upon each other in the roiling, pearly smoke pouring through the scorched floorboards, they merely nod. Sometimes they exchange a few words, but hardly enough to fill a sentence. If they say more, He clears his throat, and they resume their meditations.

Although socializing is discouraged, Charlie does know most of their stories because there are the theme songs and the group sessions. During those meetings, they’re a collective body of nerves. They tremble en mass like dull brown leaves on a dead wood tree. Outside of meetings, they’re like monks who’ve taken a vow of silence.

Here on the first floor, called the “Between,” the more universal term for the antiquated Catholic word ‘Limbo,” Charlie gets to review his former life. Anyone who winds up here, obviously didn’t make a passing grade. If they had, they’d have shot right through to the floor above. Sometimes they’re allowed a peek at that place (as an incentive, Charlie thinks.) It isn’t at all the way he pictured it, his assumptions based on descriptions in books written by people who’ve claimed they had near death experiences. He doesn’t say those claims are bogus; it’s just not how he imagined heaven would be.

There is a level playing field here. There are Thooops present you wouldn’t expect to get a second chance—Jeffrey Dahmer types who’re working out their sins. Not many though. I can tell you that.

The coweled pacers spend more time among the living than the dead though. It’s an important component of their introspection. They get to witness the long-term effects of their actions on Earth. There is a serial killer here who meets up with his victims from time to time and also spends decades on earth (unseen, of course) with the victim’s loved ones. He is going through another kind of hell at a much slower burn rate than those in the basement, let me tell you. The Great One must believe he’s redeemable though, or he wouldn’t be bothering with him.

CHAPTER THREE

Charlie hears the sudden, earsplitting blast of a trumpet. He has been warned about this. He braces himself for the journey. He shoots like an asteroid toward the planet; and although he has no form or substance, he slams to the floor of what used to be his bedroom without making a noise and feels the impact as though he were solid. He stands up, and, out of habit, checks for broken bones and brushes himself off. He’s not anxious to look at the bed. Instead, his gaze falls on the crossword puzzle he was working on the night before he died. It is lying on the bedside table. He walks over, picks up the pencil and fills in the four-letter word. He stares at what he’s written, but the squares remain blank.

It is morning; the pearl gray ink of dawn floods the room. Maxine is beginning to stir. He stands by the bed peering down at himself. It must have happened hours ago, he surmises. His carcass has already stiffened and grown cold. His manikin hands clutch his chest. His head and neck are pitched backwards; his eyes and mouth are open wide as though frozen in a moment of recognition.

He has an epiphany then, realizes that he had known seconds before that he was about to die. What tipped me off? he wonders. What were my final thoughts? He needn’t have asked. The anguish on his cold, dead face reveals that he was neither ready nor willing to leave or perhaps that he’d suffered excruciating pain when the clot slammed into his heart. Maxine rolls over and her flaccid upper arm grazes his. She is still too bound in sleep to register the gathering coolness of his skin.

She is awakened by the rumbling of her own flatulence. She feels the pressure of her bladder, rolls out of bed and pads to the master bathroom, which is the size of guest rooms in most other houses. He follows her to the bathroom door in his cloak of invisibility. The imported Italian marble on the floor is cold against the soles of her feet. His formless self is omniscient and can read her thoughts. She’d have been happy with linoleum; it’s so much warmer; but he wouldn’t have it.

She hikes her flannel nightgown past her waist to pee, (she has dozens of silk negligees, but prefers the cotton flannel) then rises, and pumps a dollop of Parisian soap on her hands from a gold-plated dispenser on the wall above the sink. She waves her hands under the faucet (also gold plated,) and it turns on as if by magic. She splashes her apple-round cheeks with cold water, wipes the thin layer of cream from her face with a premoistened towlette, picks a yellow seed from the corner of her gray eye, and draws a comb through her strawberry blonde hair. When she turns to leave, he steps aside to let her pass before it dawns on him that he is less than air. She reaches to straighten the net on her hair, and her elbow passes through his rib cage. She pauses for a second, thinks she smells a stale odor, then moves on toward the rumpled bed.

They are told in group that sometimes their ghost emits an odor that the living can detect. He recalls then, as a small boy, how he thought he smelled the aroma of his deceased grandfather’s pipe—how he was positive Grandpa Pop Pop was somewhere in the room. He would hop out of bed, switch the light on and search for him in his closet, under his bed, even in his dresser drawers as though Pop were a contortionist and could fold himself inside like the American flag they draped over his coffin.

Maxine pads across the walnut floor to the walk-in closet to retrieve her robe. Her back is to his form on the bed.

“I’ll have you know I woke up last night trying to come up with that four-letter word for ‘finished’—the one for the crossword puzzle you were working,” she said. “And just now, it popped into my head.”

She walks to the nightstand, unconsciously catching the subliminal message of his pose in her peripheral vision and pencils in the word. When she moves away, his formless self reads the letters she’s printed in the cruel, hard-edged boxes: D-E-A-D.

He turns to watch after her as she fumbles with the buttons on her robe. She is heading downstairs to start the coffee. Forgetting again that he is without form or substance, Charlie steps aside to let her pass. She smells of Parisian soup. She stoops to the floor to retrieve a sheet of lavender scented stationery; her eyes peruse what is written there:

Visit his brother in Seattle.

Take a Mississippi riverboat ride to St. Louis.

See a Broadway play.

Start a vegetable garden.

Read the Harry Potter Series.

Play Scrabble with Maxine.

Take our grandchildren to Disneyland when they’re old enough—

all the things they were going to do together, Maxine and he. She pauses long enough for Charlie to study her face, and it occurs to him how long it’s been since he took her in. Fine lines he hadn’t noticed previously spread gently from the corners of her eyes and curve down over her cheeks. Her upper lids have grown papery and slightly translucent. Her eyes are not as clear blue as they used to be; yet he finds her more beautiful than he’d remembered. She is the lush green grass, and he stands on the wrong side of the fence.

“Do you know, Maxine, that you’re a beautiful woman? You grow more beautiful every day. Have I bothered to tell you that lately?” He could have screamed it, and she wouldn’t have heard him. He feels utterly impotent.

When she reads the last line about the grandchildren yet to be born, a smile plays at the corner of her mouth. She folds the sheet of paper, slips it in the pocket of her robe and continues toward the door. When she is almost there she stops abruptly, as though someone has yanked her from behind. She draws a sharp, shuddering breath, turns slowly, very slowly and forces her eyes to fall on the bed. His rigid pose informs her that it is already too late. There’s no need to dial 911. She wails, clutches the throat of her robe, and crumbles to the floor. She crawls to the side of the bed, pulls herself upright with great effort and throws herself across the body that was his.

CHAPTER THREE

He is leaning over Maxine who lies limp and sobbing over his corpse. He tries to pull her away and feels angry and frustrated when his useless, phantom hands slip through her shoulders. He wants to take her in his arms—tell her how sorry he is that they won’t be doing the things on that list….together….as a couple. He wants to tell her to go ahead and do them anyway, but he knows she won’t. She will do other things, but not those. Doing otherwise would make her feel an infidel. He knows how she thinks.

He experiences again the sensation of being sucked through an impossibly narrow straw and hears the accompaning ‘thooop.” In a flash, he shoots from the anus of a wormhole and lands on a metal chair directly over a furnace flue, and it’s hot as hell. He’s back in the “Between” sitting in a circle among other hooded hunchbacks.

The therapist says “Sorry about that, Charlie; but I had to zip you back for group.”

Charlie is pissed about the group leader’s timing. He’s on the verge of saying that Maxine needed him there more than he needed him here, but thinks better of it. He’s not stupid. He doesn’t want to offend. He knows the group leader will weigh in on the final verdict.

“You wouldn’t have been any good to her, you know,” says the facilitator.

“Charlie doesn’t catch on right away that he’s addressing him. When he does, he simply nods his head.

“As you can see, Charlie. You’re in the hot seat….literally.”

The others chuckle.

“That means it’s your turn to share,” he continues.

Charlie is still absorbing everything that’s just happened back there….with Maxine. He’s still derailed by the experience—still trying to make sense of it all. He’d feel better if he could retch; but he doesn’t have the stomach for it….literally.

“Just say anything that pops into your air head, Charlie. Tell us what you’re feeling at this very moment. Take a stab at spontaneity,” he urges.

“I’m wrenched with grief.”

“Over your untimely death?”

“Of course. I was too young. I wasn’t ready to leave. I was just figuring things out. I…we had all these plans…”

“You’re a slow learner, Charlie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. We’ll save that for later. Tell us what else you are feeling.”

“I’m worried about Maxine. How she’ll manage without me.”

“You needn’t. She’ll be okay. She’s done it before; she can do it again.”

“What do you mean? She’s done it before. We’ve been together for the last thirty-some years! She’s never been without me.”

“How many would that be exactly, Charlie? Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-five…”

“Thirty-three, I think. Yes, I’m positive.”

“Nearly thirty-eight, Charlie. You would have been married thirty-eight years next month.”

A cloak with a female voice sighs with disgust. “Men!”

Charlie pretends not to hear.

“My point exactly,” says Charlie. “We’ve been together a very long time. Maxine’s not used to being alone.”

“Oh, really? ….not used to being alone. So what you’re saying, Charlie, is that you’re indispensable….to Maxine.”

“I’m saying there are lots of things she won’t be able to handle without me.”

“Oh Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. There are so many things you don’t know about Maxine. For example, she….”

A bell tolls to dismiss the meeting.

“Oh, I’m sorry. It seems our session has ended,” says the facilitator.

The cloak sitting on the chair next to Charlie laughs a little too wickedly for his own good and says, “Don’t you just hate it when he leaves you hanging like that?”

The bell tolls again later that day and the meeting reconvenes. The vacant gray cloaks choose a seat, judiciously avoiding the chair over the flue. Charlie is anxious to learn what it is the facilitator knows about Maxine that he doesn’t. The facilitator’s presumptions are ludicrous. His wife is a very simplistic, straight forward person. By simplistic, Charlie doesn’t mean dull-minded. He means to say that her life is like a G-rated ad splashed on the side of a city bus. There are no surprises there.

“Where were we?” the group leader says after they’ve taken their seats.

Charlie is quick to remind him.

“You were about to tell me things I didn’t know about my wife.” He’s unable to subdue the smirk on his face—well not on his face exactly, (he doesn’t have one). The smirk is in his voice.

“Ah, yes, Maxine. Now there’s a complicated woman…”

It’s too much. Charlie can’t hold it in. He laughs uproariously.

“She cleans and cooks and shops and sits on that damn swing and sketches flowers. Yup, she’s complicated all right. Look, I’m not disparaging her, honest. I mean, she’s salt of the earth. The long hours I worked, I never had to worry about her… you know….fooling around…”

There is a long, eerie thooop—, and someone lands in the hot seat.

“Beverly, I thought you’d never get here,” says the facilitator. “How was your trip?”

“I’d rather not talk about it, thank you very much,” she answers.

There’s a loud buzz, and she leaps from the chair that’s zapped her. She spins to look at it.

“As you can see, not sharing isn’t an option,” says the group leader. “Please sit.”

She’s reluctant to do so. It’s understandable that she’d be wary. We notice that the rear of her robe is singed.

“It’s okay, Beverly,” says our leader. “That won’t happen again as long as you cooperate. Go on now—sit. We haven’t all day. Well actually we do. In fact, you might say we have eternity,” he quips.

The Vienna Boy’s Choir begins to sing Until the Twelfth of Never. There is a collective groan. The idea of spending forever in this God forsaken place is unbearable.

“What were the circumstances of your death, Beverly?” the facilitator continues.

She hangs her coweled head. It’s too painful to discuss. Charlie’s mind reels with morbid scenarios, all of which end with no identifiable remains: burned to a crisp in a fire, smashed to smithereens in a car crash, found dead and decomposed in a ravine at the hands of a serial killer. He wonders if the killer is among them now. He scans the crowd looking for someone whose hooded head droops lower than the others.

“Let me begin with an easier question: How old were you at the time of your death?

“I was twenty-seven.”

“And from what day in your life have you just now returned?”

“The day of my funeral.”

“How did that go?”

“Not exactly as I’d planned.”

“You planned your funeral! But you’re only twenty-seven. Why in God’s name would you do that!” asked a woman in an adjacent chair. The mild crackle in her voice and the soft, distant music informed the other Thoops that she was in her late seventies, maybe eighties—Silver Threads Among the Gold.

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