by
"Are you going to Boston to spend the weekend with your friends, dear?"
Laura Tomsen absently took her eyes off the television set in the headrest in front of her, and glanced aside at the gray-haired woman sitting in the adjacent seat. "Hmm?"
"It's July Fourth weekend," the little old lady explained with a maternal smile. "I thought you might be going to Boston to have a good time."
"Oh, not by a long shot," Laura replied with a smile that died as soon as it appeared. "My father died this week."
"Oh dear, I'm so sorry." An aged hand reached across the two armrests to squeeze a much more youthful member. "Was it tragic?" The hand shot to the mouth. "Oh, dear, that's really none of my business, now is it?"
"It's okay," Laura assured her with another flash of a smile. "To be honest, I really don't know how he died. All my Aunt Astrid will tell me is that his housekeeper found him in the bathtub."
The elderly woman obediently shifted her seat into the upright position as
the pilot announced the final descent into Logan. "Sounds like he went
peacefully," she observed with a warm, relieved smile directed inward. "Thank
God for that."
"Is anyone here?"
When no one replied to the question shouted into the silence of the funeral home, the late night arrival went ahead and signed the registry. Then, leaving her carry-ons beside the door to the adjacent room, she approached with trembling hands the casket resting at the far end of that room.
Those hands rose to cover Laura's trembling lips as she drew up in front of her father's prostrate form. Then, with a smile through the tears that had rolled down her cheeks, she walked over to one of the many wreaths donated by relatives and reached down to pluck a white carnation.
Laura returned to the casket and slipped the stem of the flower into the pocket over her father's heart. "You need a little decoration, Daddy." As she pulled away, she noticed a redness on his right wrist that had been cleverly hidden by makeup and positioning, cleverly but not completely. Overcome by curiosity, she reached for the wrist and turned it over.
It was upon the sight of the second slashed wrist that Laura turned away and started to sob uncontrollably. And it was as she sank to her knees that she saw she wasn't alone after all: a frightened-looking man she did not recognize ducked away from the double doors opening onto the hallway outside.
Laura was left to cry for her father alone.
"...and so let us give thanks to the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, as we deliver Hans Anders Tomsen unto Him. Let us give thanks with the hymn…"
Laura Tomsen did not wait to hear the title of the elegy, but instead stood up from her seat at the front of the gathered mourners, and, to their quiet gasps, darted across the cemetery grass to the undertaker attempting to make a quick getaway in his hearse.
Maurice Wilks of Wilks Funeral Services pretended not to see or hear the knuckles rapping on the driver's side window, and only acknowledged Laura's presence when she stepped in front of the vehicle as it started to move. Then he frowned, rolled the window down a crack, and forced a smile as he asked, "Something I can help you with, Miss Tomsen?"
"Yes, Mister Wilks, there is," Laura replied with both hands on the hips beneath her black dress after she returned to the window. She leaned forward and placed those hands on her knees. "What were you so frightened of last night?"
Mr. Wilks looked ahead, down the road that ran amongst the gravestones. "I don't know what you mean."
"Allow me to remind you, Mister Wilks, that we have yet to pay for this funeral. You deal with death every day, but there was something about my father that's had you very frightened." Laura cocked her blonde hair to one side. "And I know it couldn't be me you're afraid of."
Mr. Wilks looked ahead, but spoke to his side. "It was his smile."
"You never met my father in his life--"
"Exactly. He was smiling when the morgue delivered him to us. A serene, peaceful smile on a suicide victim. In all my years, I've never seen anything like it. Excuse me." Without another word, Mr. Wilks jerked down on the shift and sped away in a cloud of dust.
Laura coughed her way back to her seat beside her Aunt Astrid's, and
pretended to pay attention to the rest of the service.
"I do hope you'll stay the night, Aunt Astrid."
Laura's Aunt Astrid looked up from her needlework, only to look at the enormous projection TV resting against one wall of her late brother's living room. "I tell you there's no sense in how your father spent his money. Here he bought a big TV with cable, and I've had to make do with my little old set. Like he was even home to watch it."
"You didn't answer my question, Aunt Astrid." Laura curled two knees up beneath her nightshirt as she adjusted herself on her end of the couch. "I don't know if I can spend the night in this big house alone."
"You didn't ask a question; you made a statement," Astrid replied with her eyes on her needlework. "But I'll go ahead and answer it anyway. As long as you answer a question of mine first."
"Ask it," Laura replied over her cup of cocoa.
The needlework dropped to Astrid's lap. "For the love of God, girl, what were you thinking today?"
Laura wiped at the cocoa that had splashed on her nightshirt. "What do you mean?"
"The funeral: that's what I mean! What did you have to say to Mister Wilks that was more important than your father?"
"It was about my father," Laura replied as she stood up to return to the kitchen.
"Well?" Astrid prompted from her stationary position at the far end of the couch.
Laura waited to reply until she had retrieved a napkin and was on her way back to the couch. "I asked him what he was afraid of."
"What could an undertaker possibly be afraid of?"
"Exactly." Laura was curled up on her end of the couch once more. "Aunt Astrid."
"Yes?" A long needle pierced wool.
"You didn't tell me that father killed himself."
Wool rubbed against wool after the needle passed through. "I know it's not fashionable in this day and age, but some things are best left untold."
"But he's--was--my father!" Laura set the cooling mug of cocoa on a coaster and brought her knees up to the breasts filling out her shirt.
"Take a tissue, dear," Astrid instructed. "Your father still is your father, wherever he is. I knew him better than anyone else on Earth, and I have no idea why he did it."
"He missed mother?" Laura offered before blowing her nose.
"Your mother--God bless her--has been dead for ten years, Laura. And you and I both know he was too wrapped up in his research to notice anyone else, much less care about them. Why, having her head hacked off and put in whatever they call that--"
"Cryonic suspension."
"Just goes to show how much he cared about her."
Laura picked up her mug once more, and saw that "Heaven Can Wait" was the Saturday night movie. "What was father working on, Aunt Astrid?"
"Beats the hell out of me," the old woman replied.
Laura knocked on the slightly-ajar door to her father's office at the Boston Institute of Technology. "Is anyone there?"
When no one within answered, Laura looked both ways down the empty hallway, then pushed the door open further and stepped inside.
Inside was the detritus of an academic career: a desk set against one wall of a cramped office, its surface piled high with papers topped with odd paperweights (such as a plastic mold of a skull missing its mandible), and many, many bookshelves overstuffed with medical textbooks stacked vertically and horizontally. Laura looked about the stifling room and saw her father sitting at his desk on a warm spring day, preparing his notes for a lecture on neurology as numerous corners of paper fluttered in a breeze from the nearest window.
It was when she looked beyond that window, towards the back of the office, that Laura suffered her first chill. At one end of a second, larger desk set against the far wall, a desk that she hadn't seen on her last visit, a human brain lay suspended in a clear liquid and encased in a glass case similar to those once used to house stocktickers. A nest of wires protruded from the brain’s stem and snaked out of the case through a single large cord to a large metal box that was, bizarrely, set next to a television set and a VCR on the opposite end of the desk.
Laura approached the VCR, letting the Sunday morning light fall on her fair skin as she did so, and saw that the VCR was in "record" mode. She reached out a shaking finger to turn the TV on, but a voice warned, "I wouldn't do that if I were you."
The finger snapped back and Laura spun around in the radiant light to face the voice from the doorway.
"Can I help you?" A man Laura's age, sporting unshaven and hollow cheeks, as well as a white lab coat and a bed-crushed spike of hair, stood in the doorway with one hand firmly gripping a knob.
"You may. Perhaps." Laura took a step towards the door and reached out her hand. "Laura Tomsen."
The stranger shook her hand perfunctorily, then dropped it. "Peter Myers. You must be Doctor Tomsen's daughter."
Laura's smile brightened as she tucked a stray wisp of gold behind one ear. "He's told you about me?"
Myers gestured to the nearest desk with a chiseled chin. "Your picture's on his desk."
"Oh." Laura dropped her hand. "Did you two work together?"
"A lot." Myers lessened his grip on the knob. "I'm his assistant. Or was, I suppose." A flash of fear sparked his eyes.
"Yes, I know he's dead. I didn't see you at the funeral yesterday." Laura smoothed her hands over the gray skirt she now felt self-conscious of.
"My apologies. I was a bit busy."
For the first time, Laura noticed the trash bags resting against the interior wall and near the door, paper shreds poking out of their cinched tops. "You know, I could help you with that: I'm sure there are plenty of personal things the family would like to keep."
"Thanks, but not necessary." Myers removed his hand from the knob, and reached down for two of the four bags. "I think the only personal effects your dad kept are on his desk."
Laura gave the office one vast sweep with her eyes. "And the rest?"
Myers held the two trash bags tightly to his chest, protectively. "It belongs to the Institute."
Laura looked him up and down, noticing carpenter shorts and sandals beneath the lab coat. "You're clearing his office out on a Sunday morning."
Myers looked away, at the sun blazing through the two windows. "I'm headed back home today, and thought I'd get it done before I left."
"There wasn't any security at the front desk."
"The guard's making a round. They're like clockwork here." Myers looked at her again. "How'd you get in here?"
"The lobby door was chocked open." She looked down. "With a brown sandal."
Myers took a step back. "Well, I'd love to talk more, but I've really got to finish up here."
"One last thing." Laura glanced back at the brain floating within the glass. "What was my father working on when he died?"
"That I'm not at liberty to disclose. The Institute's regulations--"
"Probably frown on graduate assistants clearing out their professors' offices without permission." Laura turned, took several steps towards the back of the room, and heard the trash bags drop to the floor. "I'm very curious as to what this VCR's recording."
Myers's hand was on hers when she reached again for the TV's power button. "I wouldn't--"
"I'll scream rape!" Laura shoved his hand aside.
"Are you crazy?" Myers grabbed both of her arms, reaching around her and pulling her close in the process.
Laura allowed herself to be held, and looked up into his eyes with steeled blue. "Does it look crazy?"
Myers held her a moment more, then released her. "Fine." He jabbed the power
button with his thumb, then stepped away.
Laura leaned forward out of her father's chair, her hands in her lap and her mouth hanging open. "I've never seen anything like it!" she exclaimed after a full minute of staring at a scene of a tree-lined meadow beneath incandescent stars somehow visible in the sky even though a pleasant sun shone upon the waving grass.
"Most people haven't." Myers leaned against the far end of the desk, his back to the brain as he absently stared down the length of the room with his arms folded on his chest.
"How on Earth did you create these images?"
"We didn't."
Laura looked away from the screen, briefly. "What do you mean?""
"How 'bout a cup of coffee?"
Laura glanced at the window shade Myers had drawn for her. "It's eighty degrees outside."
"Iced coffee, then."
"Two eggs, sunny side up, bacon burned. Oh, and more coffee, please."
Laura leaned against her side of the booth, and crinkled her nose as Myers lit another Marlboro with the one nearly expired. "You look pretty healthy for a guy who lives off meat and cigarettes."
Myers raised the last of his second cup, and made a toasting motion. "Don't forget the caffeine." He tipped his head back to drain the dregs. "It's a recent thing."
"Temporary?" she asked with a hopeful note.
"Everything's temporary."
Laura waited until the waitress had re-filled Myers's cup and retreated from the corner booth. "So what was in my father's office?"
Myers looked about the coffee shop to see who might be eavesdropping over the uncomfortably loud television floating above their heads. "Consciousness."
Laura knit her brow. "What do you mean, 'consciousness'?"
"Exactly that." Myers finally stopped pouring sugar into his third cup. "Have you ever had a near-death experience?"
"No."..."Why?"
"It's what started this whole thing. Or rather a lot of 'em." Myers let his sipped cup rest in its saucer, and set his elbows on the table to intertwine the fingers of his hands. "You're familiar with The Lancet?"
"Sure. I think my dad subscribed for years."
"Well, he read a study in it a year and a half ago, on NDEs in the Netherlands, about heart-attack victims who reported having visions, verified out-of-body experiences and such things, all while they were clinically dead. It was the first scientific proof of life after clinical death, and that got him to thinking."
Laura leaned back and raised a straw to her lips. "About what?"
"About consciousness." Myers glanced out the window of the coffee shop, at the Sunday brunch crowd milling back and forth along the street. "The 'Great Beyond'." He looked back at her. "You watch TV?"
"Everyone does. What does--"
"It's the best analogy." Myers look up, above their heads. "Your dad had this theory that all consciousness is merely waves traveling through the universe, just like the electromagnetic waves that carry TV pictures and sound."
"And every human is a TV set?" Laura sipped her iced coffee daintily.
"Every human nervous system, as well as any other nervous system in the animal kingdom, not to mention other forms of life. You might say all of evolution is the creation of bigger and better receptors--brains--for the waves of consciousness all around us."
Laura sucked bottom, making a brief hollow sound. "So, whose brain is that in my father's office?"
"I'm getting to that."
The conversation paused as the waitress placed Myers's plate (bacon burned) before him, asked Laura if she'd like another iced coffee, then retreated when Laura shook her head "no."
Myers stubbed his cigarette out and reached for the salt shaker. "The TV analogy is apt 'cause part of your dad's theory was that, just like a TV is set to a particular channel, a mind is set to a particular channel of consciousness."
"What about split-screen TVs?"
"Don't be difficult. Sure, one can twist the knob and change to a different station, but the set is already limited to a pre-determined range of frequencies that it can display on-screen." Myers crunched hard on a piece of charred meat. "What you see on-screen, your consciousness, depends on your hardware and how it's programmed. Every brain is unique, and so every brain is tuned to a different channel of the universe. You could think of that channel as a soul, floating free in the universe and waiting to be received by a mind that's sufficiently developed. Your father thought this was why individuals would experience things outside of their bodies after those bodies had ceased to function."
Laura allowed her eyes to caress the days-old stubble above the sheen of her breakfast partner's jawline. "Do you think two people could be tuned to the same channel, be on the same wavelength?"
Myers looked away, hard, as he held a slice of bacon between two fingers. "Never thought of that." He dropped the bacon back onto his plate, wiped his fingers with a paper napkin, and pushed the plate away. "But that sort of leads me to the rest of my explanation. Your dad had it all worked out by the time he took me on as an assistant." He looked about himself for potential eavesdroppers once more. "We recruited volunteers from the hospital, terminally-ill patients, and placed tiny electrodes on their reticular formations."
"Their what?"
"Reticular formation. It's a portion of the brain stem that, while not exactly the 'seat of consciousness,' is the place where all thoughts and senses are combined into what we think of as consciousness. You could call it the TV's antenna."
Myers reached for another cigarette. "So that's how we learned to tap Consciousness: by experimenting with the placement of these electrodes, by slowly figuring out what should go where, to the point where we had real sound and color images direct from a human brain, even five or ten minutes past the point of clinical death."
"That-that-brain," Laura closed her eyes as she uttered the word, "I saw looked more than a few minutes past."
Myers inhaled deeply, coughed, and reached for his coffee. "Which leads me to the next stage of the project. Once we learned how to tap the RFs of living beings, we applied the same technique to cadavers' brains that we electrically stimulated by placing them in a charged saline solution."
Laura shivered from a sudden chill. "So that brain in my father's office is from a cadaver."
Myers looked away, toward the light. "Not exactly."
Laura leaned forward, her brows raised. "Not exactly? If it's not from a cadaver, then whose brain is it?"
Myers looked down at the remnants of his half-eaten breakfast. "It was with the cadavers' brains that we achieved our goal: that we were finally able to tap Consciousness, beyond the point of death, that we at last had a window on the Great Beyond--"
Laura stretched both arms across the table, placing her hands in Myers's field of vision. "Whose brain is it?"
"Your father didn't tell me the next part of his plan until he showed up at the lab one day with a box--"
Laura seized Myers's fork in one hand. "Whose brain--"
Myers looked to the light again. "The box was ice-cold. He said he had just come from the cryonics lab--"
Laura's arms swept the dishes from the table to a smash-up on the floor, and she ran out of the diner with Myers in close pursuit.
Laura was off the curb and in the street before Myers had made it past the diner's front door, and he was barely in time when he pulled her back onto the curb and out of the path of a car that screeched to a halt well past the spot where she had stood only a moment before.
"You okay?" Myers asked with a hand at each end of Laura's shoulders.
Laura wiped the wide eyes that stared at the car. "Let me see it again."
"See what? Your life flash before your eyes?"
"Let me see the tape again. I want to see what my mother sees."
Myers dropped his hands. "I'll let you see it live. Let me pay the
bill."
"You know that if this is some elaborate joke, I'll have you killed, Doctor Myers." Laura was leaning forward in her father's chair once more, watching the television screen intensely.
"Peter. Please. I'm not a doctor yet, and this is not a joke." He exhaled another cloud of smoke through the window he had opened wide for ventilation. "'Sides, these days I'm not afraid to die."
Laura's mouth was hanging open once more. "I've seen this before."
"You couldn't have: it's live."
"No...no." Laura pushed herself against the back of the chair. "I've seen this place before: it's my mother's hometown!"
Now she pushed herself forward, out of the chair, and lowered herself down to a kneeling position before the TV. A cobblestoned street, empty beneath a sun that never stopped shining on TV, rolled beneath the celestial camera. A sign in Danish hanging serenely above a neatly-painted storefront became close enough to be readable, and then an elderly woman, minus the walker she had used in the last years of her life, rounded a corner, smiling, and reached out her arms for the unseen observer.
"Oh my God!" Laura raised one hand to her mouth, and began to cry again.
Myers looked away from the birds in the trees below that he had been watching. "You know that person?"
"Do I know her?" Laura moved her hand from her face to touched the aged face on the screen. Then she pulled the hand back once more, her fingertips having left beads of tears on the elderly woman's eyes. "She's my grandmother!"
"This is something new." Myers stubbed his cigarette out against the bricks of the exterior wall, and left the butt on the sill. He moved to the VCR, to ensure that it was still recording. "We've never come across a CE whose identity we can verify."
"CE?" Laura asked absently as she continued to stare at the screen.
"Celestial Entity. We've seen them before, but never knew who they were or if they even had a temporal counterpart."
Laura stood up, and wiped at her eyes. "What is this, another experiment?"
Myers pulled his hands away from the VCR. "Of course not. I just thought, since we were watching it anyway--"
Laura dried her hands by placing them on the hips beneath her skirt. "I'm taking my mother home with me."
"Sure thing." Myers glanced at the brain still resting it its saline solution in a corner of the room. "Should take about an hour to disconnect all the electrodes--"
"No." Laura stomped her foot with that syllable. "I'm taking this whole--" Laura flailed her right hand in the air as she looked for the right word, "set-up with me."
"Are you crazy?"
Laura looked down at the image of her grandmother disappearing from sight as she embraced the unseen observer. "Does it look crazy?"
"Sit down." Myers took her by the wrists, and eased her down into her father's chair before setting himself against the edge of the table. Then he gripped that table's edge hard with both hands. "I can't let you walk out of here with this equipment, 'specially when it's still hooked up to your mother's brain."
"Why not?"
"First, because all of this is Institute property."
"My mother's brain is--"
"Not the brain itself, but the equipment. Like I said, I can--"
"Does the Institute know that my father used his wife's brain?" Laura let the silence fall. "Didn't think so. You can say this particular set broke and let me take her out of here in a box."
"I still can't let you do that."
"Why 'still'?"
Myers slapped the table with both palms. "'Cause it would set the world on fire."
Laura slumped back in the chair. "What on Earth are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the end of the world as we know it." Myers's palms slapped the table with each of his last four words. Then he sank to the floor, to kneel on one knee before the seated Laura. "Think it through: what would happen if word of this got out, if, God forbid, that videotape was broadcast?"
"Maybe the world would be a better place."
"Maybe. Maybe not." Now Myers laid his left palm on an armrest. "If people knew there was life after death, even after suicide, and that everybody, good and evil went--"
"Wait a second." Laura rose up out of the chair suddenly enough to knock Myers off balance and force him to place both palms on the floor. She looked down on him. "You knew my father committed suicide. And you know why."
Myers pushed himself up off the floor after regaining his balance, then dusted his hands. "Just because I knew about something doesn't mean I had anything to do with it."
Laura turned away from him and the brain sitting in a corner, and looked out upon the trees and grass resting beneath a shining sun. "My father wanted to join my mother in heaven. That's why he wanted to kill himself."
She turned back. "So I found out what I came here to find out: why my father did it. Now I can leave." She stepped past Myers to push the eject button on the VCR.
Myers's hand pushed hers away when she reached for the emerging videotape. "I can't let you leave with this!" He slipped the tape inside a pocket of his lab coat.
"I have ways of persuasion." Laura stepped back and lifted her skirt to reveal a pair of lean, tan thighs. "You like what you see?"
Myers's eyes were locked downward. "Definitely."
"Too bad." Laura dropped her raised thigh and kicked hard with the opposite leg, dropping Myers to the floor with a blow to the groin. She hopped over his cursing form, unplugged the brain's case with a hard jerk, and dashed for the door with her mother's brain and case in her arms.
Laura managed to manipulate the knob enough to open the door to the hallway, but Myers was with her the moment she stepped out, stepping in front of her and putting his own arms around the case.
"I can't--"
"The hell you can't!"
Laura tried a groin kick once more, but the wiser Myers only twisted to one side and allowed his opponent to throw herself off balance. Her resulting fall tore the case out of both sets of arms and tossed it to the hallway floor, where it shattered on impact.
The late Mrs. Tomsen's brain went bouncing and rolling down the vinyl floor of the hallway, a nest of wires flapping along with it. The brain finally rolled to a stop at the feet of a security guard, who looked down at the organ with a hanging jaw. The jaw shut firmly with rage after he looked up at the two still lying on the floor. "What in the hell do you think you two are doin'?"
Myers pushed himself up, then pulled Laura up. "Just run: they'll never press charges."
Laura slapped his hand away. "Now you're the one who's crazy! I'm not going to run like a fugitive!"
Myers dropped his hand and looked at the guard already barking into his walkie-talkie. "We were just cleaning out Doctor Tomsen's office."
"Tell that to the boss!" the guard replied with another glance at the
brain on the floor.
"Certainly. I'll get it wrapped up right away."..."You too."
The chief of BIT security hung up the phone on his desk, and sighed as he placed both forearms on the desk calender in the center of the paper clutter. "Today is a lucky day for both of you."
"How so?" Laura asked.
The chief stood up from his desk, and motioned for Laura and Myers to do the same. "The president of the university has decided to let this drop quietly." The chief looked at Laura and sighed. "He understands, Miss Tomsen, that you're most likely distraught at the death of your father, and that you and Mister Myers got a little carried away in cleaning out his office." The chief's face remained straight. "The president will have the appropriate colleagues of your father's clean his office out within the next few days and have his personal effects delivered to you promptly. As for you, Mister Myers," the chief only looked in Myers's general direction, "the Institute will be in touch with you shortly regarding your reassignment. Let me show you two out."
Laura and Myers didn't speak to one another again until they stood in the sunlight once more, out of sight of the guards who had escorted them out of the administration building.
"I'm sorry about kicking you like that." Laura looked down at Myers's crotch, which was still hidden by the lab coat.
Myers smiled up at the descending sun as he slipped on a pair of sunglasses. "You're really not, but thanks anyway." He coughed. "Sorry about your mother."
Laura squinted against the sun as she let it warm her face. "It's okay. I'll be seeing the both of them again soon, I suppose."
"Well, let's not hope too soon."
Laura opened her eyes to look at him. "So what happens to you now?"
Now it was Myers's turn to look off into the sunset. "In the short term, nothing new. I was planning to head back to Toronto anyway, til BIT found me a new prof. I'll still head to Toronto, but I don't know about the new prof part."
Laura looked away. "How 'bout dinner?" She looked away even further. "I mean, my Aunt Astrid told me she's fixing dinner tonight, and she always makes too much--"
"Dinner." Myers smiled at her beneath his shades. "Dinner would be nice."
"Aunt Astrid, we're home!"
Astrid Pedersen emerged from her late brother's kitchen, a floured apron tied neatly around her plump figure. "Perfect timing. And you must be Doctor Myers."
"Peter. Please. No doctorate yet." Myers squeezed the old woman's hand gently.
Astrid beckoned the two inside from the foyer. "Well, come on in and make yourself at home. It's such a nice evening out--I thought we could have dinner on the back porch."
"That would be lovely," Laura declared.
"That's good," Astrid replied behind a back already turned, "since you get to
set the table back there."
"So this is your dad's home?"
"Sure is." Laura snapped out the first of three well-starched napkins she had received from an indoor cupboard, and made the first of three folds. "The one I grew up in."
Both table-setters listened silently for a moment as the voice of the six o'clock news anchor wafted through an open window, from the kitchen where Astrid was putting the final touches on dinner. "Must be nice to be home. Even under the circumstances."
"It always is, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't know: I haven't been home in a while."
Before Laura could respond, a shrill scream from the kitchen and a smashing dish ended the peaceful interlude. "Aust Astrid?" Laura darted for the back door, leaving its screen to bang against a jamb but for the hand of Myers, who was right behind her.
"Aunt Astrid!" Now it was Laura's turn to scream in the kitchen, and she was on her knees beside the crumpled form on the floor when Myers entered behind her.
"Call Nine-One-One now!" Myers pushed the victim's niece aside, rolled the elderly woman over into the lasagna she had dropped, and began CPR after checking her vital signs.
"Tell them it's a myocardial infarction!" Myers shouted up, at the Laura on the kitchen phone.
"A what?" Laura asked after requesting an ambulance.
"It's a heart attack!" Myers's lips descended to Astrid's.
Laura relayed the information, nodded, then hung up. "It's on its way."
"Good, 'cause she's gonna need more than I can give 'er." Myers resumed the hammering of the elderly woman's chest with the balls of his hands.
"Oh my God."
"What?" Myers looked up from Astrid's wide, lifeless stare, beads of sweat pouring down on his face.
Laura didn't answer, but let the voice emanating from the television tell it all: "...we have yet to receive an official response from BIT, but Channel Six News has just learned that a Doctor Stuart Cheevers will be holding a news conference at ten a.m. tomorrow morning, reportedly related to this extraordinary videotape."
The TV screen showed images from the videotape last seen descending into Myers's pocket.
"That son of a bitch!" Myers stood up from the body on the floor.
"What? You know him?"
"Cheevers had nothing to do with it! Now he's gonna take all the credit, and the Institute's gonna help 'im!"
"My Aunt Astrid," Laura prompted softly with a look at the floor.
Myers took a step towards life. "I'm sorry. She's too far gone."
Laura sank towards the floor, but into Myers's arms. "Aunt Astrid."
Myers continued to hold her, even as they lay on the floor with their backs against the fridge. "I'm sorry. But we know she's going to a better place."
"I'll say." Laura snapped her head back and began laughing, infecting Myers with her mirth in the process. "To spend all your life struggling to succeed, then learn that your whole life is just a stint in a cosmic kindergarten."
"Then it's true," Myers observed.
Laura found her lips near his stubble. "What's that?"
Myers looked not at her, but up at the tiny television screen on the kitchen counter. "Everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten."
At this, both laughed until their lips met. It was at the moment of impact that the doorbell rang.
"The ambulance. Aunt Astrid." Laura pushed herself up off the kitchen floor, and dusted her skirt.
"We can try again," Myers was already crawling back to his patient, "but
it'll have to be quick."
"Sorry again."
Laura snuggled against Myers's shoulder, and absently looked across his chest at another television set suspended in a corner of the hospital waiting room.
"It's not your fault. Her time came."
"About the tape. It must have fallen out of my pocket when we took that spill in the hallway."
Laura snuggled closer. "That's not your fault either. It slipped out, and I can't blame you for not noticing it was gone, what with everything else happening."
"Thanks for being so understanding."
Laura turned her face into the smoothest part of his neck, beneath the ear. "Thanks for being here."
"What're you going to do now?"
Laura pulled back, and stood straight in her own bucket seat. "I haven't even begun to think about that."
"You don't have to."
"I don't, but I should." She ran a hand over her forehead and hair, and sighed a very deep sigh. "I just can't think of spending another night in that house, with both of them dead."
"Let me return a favor."
Laura looked aside at him. "What do you mean?"
"Come back to Toronto with me. I can put you up in my parents place for a few days."
"But the funeral--"
"You've already said you can't have it til next weekend with all the relatives having just got home from the last funeral. Take forty-eight hours off."
Laura looked up at the television screen, and the images of that day's plane crash on the eleven o'clock news. "I can't think of flying right now."
"You don't have to think. I'll drive."
Laura glanced down, over her raised cup of coffee, at Myers's bowl of oatmeal. "I see you're turning over a new leaf," she observed with a wan smile.
Myers speared a grape with his fork as he swallowed his latest spoonful of mush. "Not really. I just realized that there are reasons other than longevity for eating right."
"Like constipation?" Laura asked with the same smile.
"You said it; not me." Myers spooned up more of his breakfast.
"...We are interrupting this live news conference to bring you breaking developments from the Middle East. A rash of suicide bombings--"
Laura's mouth hung open over her coffee. "It's started--"
Myers looked across the roadside cafe at the television set in the opposite corner. "What?"
"Suicide bombers. Now they know there's a heaven for them--"
"Don't be silly: the tape only aired last night." Myers reached for a slice of dry whole wheat toast.
A murmur passed through the crowded dining area, and Laura turned her head to listen to the gossip in the booth behind her. She turned back, to face a Myers eating his breakfast in oblivion and murmur to him, "They've closed the border."
Only now did Myers look up at her. "Why?"
The anchor answered with, "And this just in as well: there has been an apparent car bombing at an office complex in Rochester, New York. Apologies for the numerous uses of the word 'apparent'--we have yet to receive independent confirmation of any of this--but the Customs Service has closed all border crossings between the United States and Canada, apparently in response to this incident. The office complex where the explosion took place is reportedly the headquarters of Arpaco, a prominent defense contractor--"
Myers laid down a half-eaten slice of toast. "These things were planned well before last night--"
"I don't care," Laura replied with her big wide eyes, "I think we should lay low."
Myers brushed his growing stubble with a napkin. "We could get a motel room. I mean 'rooms'--"
Laura placed a hand over his. "Let's get a room. And let's do it quick." She
lifted her hand to motion to the waitress for the check.
"Couldn't sleep either, huh?"
"I suppose I'm slept out." Laura stepped out onto the balcony and eased herself onto Myer's waiting lap.
Myers ran one hand up one thigh to caress a hip beneath a nightshirt. "It'll be a long day tomorrow. You still want to head to Toronto?"
Laura smiled as she curled close to her lover. "I always like to meet a guy's parents before I sleep with him. Now it's a matter of honor." She ran a hand along his chin. "You shaved."
"And showered." Myers kissed the fingers of her hand.
"You watch the news?"
"Not yet. Want to turn on the TV?"
Laura shook her button nose. "God, no. I've had enough of death for one day." She ran the fingers of her hand through Myers's newly-combed hair. "Though I would be very curious as to what news there is about that videotape." She allowed Myers to kiss her fingers once more. "Without turning on the TV, what do you think the world's reaction will be?"
"Heaven is in the eye of the beholder."
Laura pulled her fingers away, gently. "Did you make that up on your own?"
"I did." Myers pulled her arm back to his lips, and kissed her hand. "Now death is like a dream: people will see their selves reflected back when they contemplate it. Some will see peace after a life of misery, some will see redemption after a life of sin, and some will see reward for martyrdom."
Laura pulled her arm back once more, her smile more sly than before. "And what do you see, Mister Myers?"
Myers tugged at one of her arms with a grin of his own. "I see a girl up way past her bedtime." He waited until they stood toe-to-toe in the midnight darkness to ask, "What do you see in heaven?"
Laura drew close, and ran the splayed fingers of a hand up underneath her lover's t-shirt. "The only thing I see is that I no longer have to look."
The two lovers stepped indoors off the balcony, their bare feet padding past
the silent television set to the same frequency.
