Playtime (11 page)

The next morning he is coming out of his half-sleep
daze when he feels the warmth and the bright light, that same sense of not
needing to struggle and a near feeling of oneness with all around him and
realizes this is the feeling he had felt when he had been dead. Or almost dead.
Whatever. He blinks his eyes and looks up at the ceiling then closes them
again, trying to recover that sensation but it is gone. 

 Gone, but not forgotten. This is how it felt that
day. This is where he had gone. He has no doubt.   

 And the feeling of it: calm, peaceful, a
relaxation he had never felt before. He remembers! And knows that the vision or
dream or whatever he had just felt, was just a pale reflection of what he had
felt in death. He blinks his eyes and shuts them again, willing that feeling to
return. It had been like nothing he had ever experienced. But it will not come.
After a few minutes he opens them back up and looks around. 

 All the jokes and the talk about the tunnel and
the bright light don't seem quite so funny.   

 He lies there for minutes more, feeling the
traces and remnants of that, then finally gets up reluctantly and pads into the
living room to the bookcases, searches through his collection of books on brain
function, leafing through several, trying to find information on near-death
experiences. He knows that several of the neuroscientists have attempted, and
maybe succeeded in, pinpointing the brain regions involved in these. All a
matter of brain chemistry, according to them. Oxygen deprivation and lack of
sensory input combining to create a fugue or dream state. He thinks about that
for a bit. Did that explanation make the experience any less real? It was the
same when they told you that love was a result of the bonding produced by the
chemical oxytocin. Did that make the experience of love any less real? It was
just an explanation on a different level: that was all. 

 It was like someone asking you why you were going
to the store, and you began telling them about this and that neuron firing and
the apparatus to get your legs moving starting up and so on. Factual and true,
but what that person was probably looking for was the fact that you were out of
milk and were going to get some. 

 He is glad that Todd is still asleep, and he has
some time for all this to sink in. He likes to think he is a scientist in his
own way but one of the things he has learned is to respect the phenomenon.
Non-scientific types were always talking about scientific explanation ruining
the enjoyment of experience, but he doesn't believe that to be true in most
cases. Climbing and surfing are exceptions. Maybe this? 

 It had not felt at all like something was ending,
he thinks. More like something was beginning, like some limitation he hadn't
known existed was being removed. He remembers how he had thought of Renee
yesterday on the beach. That feeling that it didn't matter if she continued on
in some other form or fashion because she was lost to him. But now that he has
remembered his death, it seems to him that perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps
she was out there somewhere, still reachable.   

 He has drifted back into the bedroom, without
consciously planning that, and now sits on the bed. Oh my God, he thinks, and
drops his face into his hands, rubs his eyes, shuts them and listens to the
small sounds around him: tree branches rustling outside the window, a car
somewhere down the street, raspy click-clack of some bird, the clatter of the AC
kicking on. In his mind he shouts out "Renee." It is as loud as it
can be. He focuses his energy inward, searches for her in the darkness. Wills
her to answer. The outer sounds vanish into the background as he tries to bring
her back to him. Searching. Searching. 

 "Blaine?" His bedroom door has swung
open, and his brother is standing there in boxers and T-shirt, hair standing up
on his head like electricity is running through it. "You all right,
man?" 

 "Yeah, fine," he says, squinting up at
him. "Just resting my eyes for a minute." 

 "Oh," says Todd, like this is a common
practice, perfectly understandable. "How about some breakfast? I'll
make." 

 "Sounds great," he says, more to get
Todd out of there than because he is hungry. "Got a touch of a
headache," he lies, making it up on the spot. Sounds more convincing. 

 "Awright, my man. Breakfast coming up."
The door swings shut, and he is by himself again. 

 He blinks into the sudden return to aloneness,
and his thoughts return to death. What it is. What it isn't.   

 So the universe is what, some nearly 14 billion
years old, he thinks, and we come into it after all that time, stay less than a
blink of an eye, and we're gone. Or maybe not. What if this was just a
transition. What if we went someplace else? Maybe there was a reason that so
many people believed in heaven.   

 Better watch myself, I'll be going to séances and
holding hands with strangers at tables, he thinks. But even though he is mocking
himself, he cannot deny the power of the memory that has come back to him. If
more people had an experience like that they wouldn't be so scared of death, he
thinks. Might not fight so hard to live, either. Maybe that's why more people
don't have one. It wouldn't do not to fight hard to live, would it? 

 "Come and get it," Todd hollers from
the other room, and at the dining table are plates heaped high with poached
eggs, toast, and bacon. All microwaved but the toast. Still, for them, a
gourmet feast. The brothers sit to eat and Todd pours him some orange juice. He
is eyeballing Blaine surreptitiously as he shovels forkfuls of breakfast into
his mouth, and Blaine realizes he is concerned. He briefly considers telling
him about recovering his memory of death and decides against it. If he told him
that, he'd really be concerned. Maybe later, after he thinks about it a while,
figures out what it really means. 

 "So what did you find out from the
cops?" Todd asks. "Anything?" He had gone out to visit some old
friends the night before, and Blaine had called it a day early, before he got
home. 

 "I think they have somebody else they're
looking at," Blaine says, and tells him about the talk with Nielson and
giving his DNA, the way the guy didn't seem that interested in him. He tells
him about the defensive wounds under her nails and the lack of information at
the bar. Todd is nodding, taking it all in. He doesn't tell him about his
suspicion that she might have had a lover or two more than she admitted, or
that they could have been more serious than she let on. Really he has no idea
if those things are true, and it seems small to tarnish her memory without any
real basis. Though even if she did have a lover or two more than she admitted:
so what? They had been broken up. No law against easing the loneliness, was
there? Hell, he'd been drooling on Kimmy at the hospital and Mandy after that
just a few days ago.   

 Todd says, "Well, that all sounds good, like
they might be making some progress. These guys do this stuff for a living, bro.
I wouldn't worry so much about it. They'll find this guy." 

 Blaine nods. Todd says he has a few things he
needs to take care of this morning, couple of people to go see, so they make
plans to hook up towards evening. 

 "You be all right?" he asks. "I
can cancel out if you need me to. Nothing 'graved in stone." 

 "No, go ahead," says Blaine, getting up
and taking his dish to the sink. "I don't need to be babysat. I'm fine,
man." He knows Todd likes to make the rounds whenever he comes down to
visit, catch up with some of his old partners. He'd like a bit of time to
himself anyway. He is still unsettled about this morning, wondering what his
memory meant. He'd like to poke around in the books some more, though he
doesn't think he'll find much there. Maybe search the internet. No telling what
crackpot stuff he can find on near-death. Probably a boatload. 

There
is
a boatload and most of it
is
crackpot
stuff. That is his first impression after climbing on board the Net train and
leaving the station. There are bright lights up the kazoo. Wise explanations of
the suffering of the everyday. Telepathy. Reincarnation. He feels like he has
stepped into a time machine and travelled backwards a thousand years. He
doesn't even want to think what he would find under the
time travel
link.   

 There are international organizations, a pecking
order of gurus to choose from. He should have known. People love pecking
orders, abhor vacuums. Explanations seem to focus on the physical life as a
training ground, where we work through mistakes and learn. That is the most
common explanation for reincarnation. Basically, you keep coming back until you
have gotten it right. That allows for a hierarchy of souls to be around. Some
are old and almost have completed their learning process. Some are young with a
long way to go. He wonders where a stone killer fits in. Where evil fits in. The
favorite analogy seems to be that of a river where we are the individual drops,
joining and leaving the river as it flows to the great sea. The essence of the
drops is the same as that of the whole. 

 It all makes him want to puke. Humans have a
talent, he thinks, that ability to stand aside from experience and talk about
it. The thing is that some experiences, like those he had been thinking about
the other day, the flow of experience while surfing or climbing mountain walls,
didn't lend themselves that well to the talk. The very
act
of talking
about these experiences was a contradiction. The memorable and wonderful thing
about them was how the distance between you and everything else dissolved as
you became immersed in the acts. When you talked about them, you necessarily
brought the distance back and highlighted it. 

 It was the same with the light and the tunnel.
Here he'd had this absolutely unique thing happen to him, something unlike
anything he'd ever experienced, and these people out on the web, thousands of
them, apparently, were on it from all sides like jackals, ripping it or
something like it into a thousand small pieces that they could dissect and digest,
and in the process making the entire deal unrecognizable. He sighs. He is a
believer in science, but sometimes you can analyze things too much.   

 Though you couldn't call this science. The few
scientists involved relegated this stuff to the dust bin of brain
hallucinations brought on by lack of oxygen to certain brain regions when the
brain was shutting down. 

 Blaine gets up from the machine, stretches, shuts
it off. He doesn't know, really, what he had hoped to find, but whatever it was,
this isn't it.   

 What he should be finding is Renee's killer. 

 He thinks about what he knows so far, and where
he can go from here. Maybe somebody around her apartment area would know
something. The police had her purse and the stuff in it, so they had her phone
and addresses and numbers. If he had hold of that, he might be able to find
whatever guys she had been dating, but they had it. Her car had been down on
the beach, too, so either she had gone out there for some reason and been
surprised by someone or they had gone together. In any case, the police had the
car so he couldn't find out anything from that. He wonders if anything in her
apartment would tell him anything. It is just a small studio on the east end of
town, near the road that leads to the ferry and the Bolivar peninsula. The
police probably have it sealed also, he thinks, but it is worth a look-see. 

 He knows where she keeps her spare key. 

 So he fires the beast up and goes rumbling up to
the seawall. For a moment he can't remember what day it is, though the traffic
is heavy on the wall: surfboards everywhere, people strolling, jogging, sleek tanned
women glistening in tiny strips of cloth. Friday, right? Sunlight is everywhere,
the brightness amazing. Life is everywhere. People out doing things they like
to do. That's what Galveston Island is all about, really. It is a playground: a
place people go to get away from the everyday humdrum. Fun in the sun. An
entire community built on that. Sure, they have one or two big employers like
the hospital and American National who aren't tourist oriented, but that's about
it. The rest is a getaway fantasy they've been selling for over a hundred
years. Big, fancy hotels that overlook the water: amusement parks and giant
waterslides. One place even has an artificial beach that is much nicer than the
real ones. The sand had been imported.   

 He passes the San Luis, probably the fanciest of
the fancy hotels. Built on the only hill around: an artificial hill constructed
to house bunkers during World War 2. The gun emplacements can still be seen. The
hill had been wild and vacant for a long time, but now has bright green grass
growing, and waterfalls cascading down the side.   

 The rock groins are full of people, the beach
too. Umbrellas fluttering in the south wind, Frisbees flying, dogs running on
the sand. Lifeguards in the towers, hunched over, watching. A few people die
every year despite their vigilance. The eddies are tricky near the rocks, with
many holes where it is easy to lose your footing. Rip currents that can take
you straight out to sea.   

 Surfers surfing, too, playing their riffs like
jazz men, though the waves are on the small side today. Motion and life
everywhere, but not for Renee. 

 He finally gets through the traffic to the road
near the ferry, and the cars are backed up on that too, so he cuts off onto
some of the small back residential streets that are all named after fish.
Marlin. Redfish. Bonita. Mako.   

 He snakes back and forth on those until he comes
back to the ferry road, but much farther north, and the cars lined up finally
give him a shot to get across into her apartment buildings. 

 Nothing fancy, just your everyday apartment
complex. Brown brick and darker brown wood paneling. Tiny balconies with
barbecue gear, plants hanging from hooks. Parking spaces not much wider than
your vehicle. Speed bumps.   

 Her place is on the second floor, in back, facing
a ball field where people from UTMB practice. She is far away from the office,
and Blaine pulls in to a spot a distance down from the apartment. Her door,
#270, has no yellow tape. It looks just like it always did. This wasn't even
the scene of the crime, he thinks. The cops probably went through it, took
anything they thought was relevant, and are long gone. Which means his odds of
finding anything are slim. But, what the hell, it's not like he's doing
anything more important, is it? Slim is better than none. That's why he buys
lottery tickets. At least it's a chance. 

 He doesn't want to break in, though. Wonders what
the chances are the spare key is still there. She has potted plants scattered
around her door, set in those dishes that kept the water and soil from running
everywhere. Used to put the key in the bottom of the pot farthest from the
door. 

 The doors are inset, pushed back into small
alcoves that give shelter and also a measure of privacy, for which he is glad. 

 He gets out of the truck and climbs the stairs,
looking around. He is in luck. The only person in sight is a short black woman
walking away with a clothes basket, toward the community washroom that is near
the center of the complex. He stoops down and lifts the pot, and partially
obscured by dirt, sees the bright gleam of metal. His pulse quickens, and he
looks around one more time. Hell, he's not really breaking in; he has a key.
He's not sure what the status of the apartment is now that Renee is gone. If
her mother or somebody from the complex happens by, he can always tell them
that he had forgotten a shirt or a book or something, and came over to get it.
He hopes her mother doesn't show. He could have asked her, but when he
remembered the key this just seemed simpler, without chance of refusal. He
shakes the dirt off the key, rubs it on his jeans to clean it, puts it in the
lock and opens the door.