The book of love, p.5
The Book of Love, page 5
Laura said, “So like when there’s a cover of a song and they just totally missed the point. Like, why not just photocopy the original song lyrics and tape them to your face? Don’t pretend you and Susannah weren’t hooking up again. Just because I never said anything doesn’t mean I didn’t notice.”
“The difference is, with a cover, the original song still exists,” Daniel said. Clearly he was going to just keep sitting on the sidewalk pretending Laura had never said anything about him and Susannah. Just like he was going to pretend the whole thing had never happened. “And our real bodies, who knows?”
Laura said, “Is this helpful? What you’re saying? Come on, stand up. Your legs are brand-new! They work fine!” Her own brand-new arms and legs were growing cold even though the night was so strangely warm. But her face grew hotter and hotter, and she realized to her horror that tears were pouring down her face. When she kept on sobbing, Daniel, still sitting on the sidewalk, pulled her down into a bear hug, her head stuck in his armpit. He rocked her slowly back and forth.
He said, “You can punch me if you want to.” It was a thing Daniel did when somebody got angry or sad. He let you punch him right in the stomach. It hurt your hand more than it seemed to hurt Daniel.
In Laura’s opinion that took all the fun out of it. “Why did we have to come back in winter?” she said.
“You hate summer,” Daniel said. “You hate sweating. You hate wearing sunblock. You don’t even like watermelon.”
“In summer you can just walk into the ocean,” Laura said into Daniel’s armpit. “All the bad stuff, it all washes away when you do that.” She shoved at Daniel’s chest until he let go. “Susannah isn’t dead. Stay here, okay? I have to pee.”
“Right now?” Daniel said.
“Yeah,” Laura said. “Hold on.” There was an overgrown mulberry tree one yard down, and she went behind it. Hiked up her skirt and realized she wasn’t wearing underwear. Well, fine. She squatted and peed for so long she wondered if she’d been holding her bladder ever since she’d died.
It made her trust Mr. Anabin even less: to have given her a full bladder and no underwear.
Susannah hadn’t been there with them. Laura knew that with all of her being. Although, my God, it was almost a shame she hadn’t been. Wasn’t it? Susannah, with her on-again, off-again flirtation with all things goth. What had it been like? Like goth Disney World, she imagined telling Susannah.
It had not been like Disney World.
“Much better,” Laura said when she came out from behind the mulberry. “Now let’s go make sure Susannah’s okay.”
Daniel said, “It used to be a poodle on your skirt, right?”
“What?” Laura said.
“Your skirt,” Daniel said.
She looked down and saw the poodle was now a wolf. “You know what?” she said. “That’s not scary. I’m not even scared.”
“I am,” Daniel said. He reached his hand out for hers and she took it. Although the night was warm, his fingers were cold and so were hers. But they had been so much colder while they were dead. They started down the dark street toward home again.
The Book of Mo
Mr. Anabin’s car had an interesting smell to it. Not one Mo could put his finger on. (Could you put a finger on a smell? No, probably not.) Vaguely medicinal or herbal or something. Frankincense, myrrh, something like that.
He bet his grandmother would know what Mr. Anabin’s car smelled like. She had a whole drawerful of herbal teas. There was even a tomato mint one. It tasted exactly as bad as you’d think it would, his grandmother said. She had seemed almost pleased about it.
Mo looked over at Mr. Anabin. Mr. Anabin ignored him. There was nothing about him that said you ought to pay him any attention.
What he looked like was what Mo had always thought he was: a high school music teacher with embarrassing taste in T-shirts and a haphazardly maintained fade. Which was to say, a standard-issue public school music teacher. Which was different from looking like a musician. There were plenty of musician types in Mo’s family tree. His mother had been able to play every instrument she’d ever picked up. And his grandfather, of course, whose name Mo bore. Who might or might not know Mo even existed. Mo’s grandmother was cagey about that. He was a semi-famous drummer based in Cairo. He hadn’t toured in the United States, though, for decades. Sometimes Mo looked on YouTube to see if there were any new uploads. Concert videos. Sometimes there were. Altogether, there were about two hundred hours of YouTube footage, albeit much of it grainy. Sometimes Mo wrote comments under the videos. But he never posted them.
Like Mo, Mr. Anabin was brown in the way that made white people feel they should ask you where you were really from. Although at the moment Mo really did want to know where Mr. Anabin was from, because surely there weren’t a lot of people living in Lovesend who could raise the dead. Right? Mr. Anabin: supernaturally ambiguous. Maybe Mo would ask. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Mo: smarter than a lot of white people.
Maybe Mo was thinking about frankincense and myrrh because you used them to preserve the dead.
Moonlight was streaming into the car, so bright it stung Mo’s eyes. The tips of his fingers were powdered with chalk dust from the music room eraser. He brought them up to his nose and sniffed. A dusty, neutral smell. The smell, too, of his own perspiration. The sound of his own breathing. The taste of his own saliva. Metallic, as if his palate, teeth, and tongue had been coated in some alloy.
“Thanks,” Mo said, “for giving me a ride home.”
Mr. Anabin inclined his head. You’d have thought a music teacher would at least put on the radio when he went for a ride. The silence was kind of freaking Mo out.
He said, “Um, so. If you don’t mind? I had some questions. Number one, do you know where I live?” He wanted to remark on that nose-prickling smell (and the taste in his mouth, the eye-watering brilliance of the moon, the feel of chalk dust in the ridges of his fingers) but maybe that was kind of personal?
Mr. Anabin came to a complete stop at Walnut Street. For someone with some pretty crazy supernatural abilities, he was a cautious driver. Again, though, Mr. Anabin was brown. Mo considered this. Found it more than a little depressing.
“Yes,” Mr. Anabin said. “I know where you live.”
“Because you’re a supernatural being and you know everything?” Mo said. “Or because of some other reason?”
“Your grandmother had a dinner party for me when I first got to town,” Mr. Anabin said. “A fundraiser for the school.”
“Oh,” Mo said. “Yeah. I remember now. The caterers made little ginger cheesecakes with chocolate treble clefs. You know what? I’m really, really hungry. Any chance you’d be willing to make a detour? Swing by McDonald’s?”
“It’s very late, Mohammed,” Mr. Anabin said. “They won’t be open.”
“Then could you make a cheeseburger and also some fries? Like, could you make a large fries? With magic?” Asking this, Mo felt very cunning.
“I could,” Mr. Anabin said. He did not say this as if he felt it was something to brag about. If it had been Mo, he would have sounded more impressed with himself.
“How old are you?” Mo said. “Like really, really old?”
“Yes,” Mr. Anabin said. “About that old.”
“And you can do magic,” Mo said. “I guess I always thought magic was more of a white people thing, like in books. Like Gandalf. Or Houdini. It would explain a lot about the world if magic was a white people thing. Like hockey. Is it a job? Or would you say it’s more of a hobby? Or a condition? Like psoriasis or perfect pitch? What’s your deal, exactly?”
“Music,” Mr. Anabin said. “My deal is music. Music and balance. More or less. Sometimes more and sometimes less.”
None of these answers was, so far, Mo felt, very helpful. But he persevered.
“Are you, like, a god?”
Mr. Anabin smiled. He said, “Oh. No. Not like a god.”
“Oh, good,” Mo said. “I mean, no offense. I’m sure you would be really good at it. Or do you mean that you’re not like a god because you are a god?”
Mr. Anabin said nothing.
The car began the last steep climb past Elm and Cedar, taking them up to the Cliffs where Mo lived with his grandmother. Realm of the Gods, Mo’s grandmother called the Cliffs, because wasn’t money the thing that made you godlike? Money meant you had friends if you wanted them and plenty of peace if you didn’t. Money was religion. Money was magic. But that was only as long as there was no such thing as real magic. Unless you were Harry Potter and had both. Like, that dipshit should have gone around wearing a T-shirt that said you can never be too rich or too magical.
Now you could see the ocean through the guardrails. The extravagant and shameless moon spilling light; the soapy luster of the long, foaming lines of wave after wave; the wet, bleached shine of the beach.
If you looked down long enough at the beach and then back out, the horizon became a black door.
“You have to admit,” Mo said—not because at this point he thought he was going to manage to pry even the smallest crumb of information from Mr. Anabin but because he was not a quitter—“it’s a little weird how you just happen to be teaching at our school when all of a sudden we die and then come back to life. It kind of begs the question.”
“No,” Mr. Anabin said. “It does not. To beg the question does not mean to raise a question. It means you’re assuming a fact to be correct without giving evidence for the truth of it.”
“Right,” Mo said. “Right. Thanks for setting me straight on that. This is something I really needed to come back from the dead to learn. Oh, sweet mystery of my do-over life! Jumping off from there, and please do let me know if I’m phrasing this poorly, I’m stating that you had something to do with our death as well as us coming back. Is that begging the question?”
They were almost home now. Here was the stop sign where Maple dead-ended onto the Cliff Road. Before them now was the concrete barricade. For most of the year prior to Mo’s death, this section of Cliff Road had been closed because a big chunk of the cliff had sheared off. You had to detour onto Maple and back around. Three houses had had to be condemned. Eventually, maybe a hundred years or so from now, Mo’s grandmother’s house would also fall into the ocean. But why worry about that now?
Mr. Anabin did not turn onto Maple. The car idled. Far below, the tide was either coming in or going out. Silver clouds took the shape of strange beasts, went racing on.
“I was not the cause of your death,” Mr. Anabin said. “But it would not be incorrect to say I have an interest in this business.”
“And the other guy? Bogomil?” Mo said.
Mr. Anabin said, “He and I stand in balance.” Still the car lingered at the junction.
“Got it,” Mo said. “You and Bogomil stand in balance. Anybody else I should know about? Mrs. Paulsen in chemistry, is she a Satanist? All those pewter wolf accessories. The floor-length hemlines. I just think you should tell me if she is.”
“I have no special knowledge,” Mr. Anabin said, “of Mrs. Paulsen’s practices or beliefs.”
“Wiccan would be my guess,” Mo amended. “Is there a reason why we’re stopped? Is Maple Street currently guarded by a fearsome hellbeast or a grue? A zombie horde?”
“No,” Mr. Anabin said. He took a hand off the steering wheel and pointed at the barricade. As he did this, the Lincoln began to move forward.
“Fuck!” Mo said. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“The view is better this way,” Mr. Anabin said, and the car went through the place where the barricade had been. Mo threw his hands up in front of his face, but there was no impact. The car rolled on with only a series of small jolts as it passed over pieces of debris, across fissures in the disintegrating road. Just ahead, the cracks in the road widened. Beyond that, there was no road at all. The Lincoln moved forward, and then Mr. Anabin braked, put the car into park, and turned off the ignition.
“The fuck are you doing?” Mo repeated, his voice going up and up. They were well past the break where the cliff and road had been sheared away. Out the driver’s window was the cascade of fallen rocks, small saplings sticking straight out horizontally from the rockslide.
“You asked for a demonstration of my abilities,” Mr. Anabin said. “Will this do?”
“I wanted a cheeseburger!” Mo said.
Mr. Anabin rolled his window down. Air streamed into the car. Air, of course, was moving all around the car, and below it, too. There wasn’t anything else. “If you still want a cheeseburger, you may have one,” he said. “I can do that as well.”
“I don’t want a cheeseburger,” Mo said. “I do not want it on a plate. I do not want to levitate. I want to go home. I want to get there in one piece. I want a road, the kind with a sidewalk and a nice yellow line down the middle. I want none of this to have happened. I want to wake up in the morning and realize all of this was a really weird—an impressively weird—dream, and then I want to promptly forget most of it so when I tell my grandmother about it at breakfast, it’s confusing and missing all the exciting bits and all I can say is that I dreamed I died and there was a scary dog and also some people from school and then I couldn’t get a blackboard clean and that was the worst part for some reason.”
Mr. Anabin put his window back up. “There is one more thing I must tell you before I take you home. I don’t know the right way to say it, though.” The way he said it made Mo think Mr. Anabin rarely found himself in this situation, but so what? This wasn’t a situation Mo had ever been in, either.
“The last time a teacher said that to me, it was the guidance counselor, and he wanted me to know he knew I was gay and if I wanted to talk about anything ever, I should just stop by his office,” Mo said. “Which was completely unnecessary because I’m not exactly in the closet. My grandmother gave me a copy of Giovanni’s Room and an autographed copy of B-Boy Blues on my fifteenth birthday because, she said, the classics are important but gay boys need stories with happy endings, too. I have people I talk to already. None of them do magic or supernatural shit and I’m fine with that. Genevieve in band aside, because it’s kind of supernatural the way she’s consistently and precisely exactly two beats behind everyone else.”
“It isn’t supernatural,” Mr. Anabin said. “It’s the most astonishing natural lack of ability I have ever encountered in my long life. Examine your heart, Mo, and see if you can summon some sympathy for poor Genevieve. Who tries. Who goes on trying.”
He still didn’t say whatever it was that he apparently had to say, so Mo kept babbling. Wasn’t this the way things always went? First you think you want to know some stuff, curiosity killed the cat, etc., but then at the point of discovery, you consider your hard-won knowledge (or one-step Internet search) and realize if you had known what you were going to know once you knew it, you’d never have googled it in the first place. Most of the time a cat was sorry he ever asked. Like the yearly roundups that websites do for the worst things online, the kind Rosamel always made him look at. Sometimes all you had to do was type a word or phrase (“why” “Black” “gay” “sometimes I think about”) into Google and you saw what other people looked up and you were sad for the rest of your life. Mo had a presentiment that whatever Mr. Anabin was going to say, it wasn’t something Mo wanted to hear. And by presentiment, Mo meant a rising feeling of unease tipping over into sheer terror not unlike what it felt like to sit in a car resting on nothing at all over what was basically an abyss.
“Could you do something about that? I mean, about Genevieve? With magic? What’s the point of magic if you can’t use it to make the world a better place? And why is it you won’t tell me any of the things I want to know, but you feel you need to tell me something that I’m pretty sure is not something I want to hear?”
“Genevieve could be helped. Yes. I could help her. The cost would not be high. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Mr. Anabin said, “but nevertheless I must tell you the thing you do not wish me to tell you.”
“First you drive your car through a concrete barrier, then you park it in the middle of the air, and now you tell me that magic has a cost?” Mo said. “What’s the cost of this? A buck fifty?”
Mr. Anabin shrugged. “When I expend magic here, then Bogomil has a little more access to this world. Part of the cost of my magic is more magic for Bogomil.”
“Good to know,” Mo said. “I’ll pass on the cheeseburger.” He put his hands on his face and rubbed hard at his eyes. “Tell me whatever it is you’re going to tell me. I want to go home.”
Mr. Anabin said, “Brave Mohammed. The thing I must tell you is this. Four months ago your grandmother had a heart attack. A neighbor found her on her kitchen floor. She’d died during the night.”
Mo said, “That isn’t true.” His hand found the latch of the car door, as if his body’s first instinct was to escape.
Mr. Anabin said nothing.
“No!” Mo said. “No! I’m the one who died! She isn’t dead!”
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Anabin said.
Mo said, “She’s dead?” He pulled his knees up toward his chest. Planted his dirty feet on the fabric of the car seat. Night air was seeping up from the floor of the car, whistling in from Mr. Anabin’s window, which he had not rolled up properly after all.
Mr. Anabin said, “Yes.”
“Is she,” Mo said. And stopped. For a minute he could not go on. Mr. Anabin waited.
When he could trust his voice, Mo said, “Is she in that place?”
That place, that fucking place. Is that where you went when you died? He couldn’t imagine his grandmother there. No one made you coffee there. No one opened the lid of the jam jar or reminded you what your password was when you wanted to check your balance online or helped you with the Velcro on your tennis shoes because your knees were bad and so were your hips. But then, who had done those things for his grandmother while Mo had been missing (dead) and she had still been alive?
