The Dead Love Longer (3 page)

I backed away from the well-lighted door and its whirling dervishes. The Diana face emerged again, leering against the border of the fire. "Till death do
us
part, huh? Did you really think you'd get off that easily?"

I wished it were only the bright licking of the flames, but it was her voice.
Her words.
Her anger.

I wanted to back away some more, but the room had gotten smaller. It seemed the size of a coffin. I couldn't breathe,
then
remembered I no longer had to.

"You're going back, but I'll be with you," she whispered.
"Because you owe me."

"Owe you?" Anyone who has ever been married can tell you the arguments tend to run in circles, and each spouse falls into old, painful patterns.
Shameful patterns.

"You loved me, or at least you said you did."

"That's right, I did." I
had
loved her. I think. Who could ever know such things except God? Even dead, I wasn't sure God existed. After all, He had yet to show His holy face, and a merciful God would have spared us this post-suicide encounter.
And if God was love, then both of them shared the same lack of existence.

"When you love somebody, you owe them," she said.
"Forever and ever.
Amen."

The word "love" was delivered with a nasty edge, as if every broken heart throughout human history had been my fault. Maybe all lovers are star-crossed. After all, there can be no perfectly happy ending, unless you believe in life after death and both partners are lucky enough to end up in the same place. Love could cook up its own kettle of hell. But love could allegedly douse the flames, soothe the fevered brow,
chill
the hot and strange ardor that drove people to insane acts. Or maybe I'd listened to too many pop songs.

"I'm sorry for…you know, back then," I said. Talking feels weird when you're dead. The words come out of your throat without any air behind them. It gives you the feeling that the words have no substance. Maybe being dead wasn't going to change my communication style, at least with Diana.

She wasn't buying my brand of baloney. "You think you can make up for it now."

She coalesced into a more solid thing, and the fire dimmed behind her. Her eyes were hot sparks of hurt, both hoarding and projecting pain. The flames crawled along her bare skin like the fingers of a hundred rapists. Then they evaporated, as if she had soaked the fire into her soul. She stood before me naked, the hallway dark and endless behind her. The bloated, gray pallor that marked her death was gone, and her skin was flushed pink by some obscene ardor.

She was beautiful, damn her.

"You can't turn back the clock," I said, the cliché lame as it left my lips and the contradictory clock on the wall mocking me.

"What's done is done," she said in near sarcasm.

I shrugged. "I did love you."

"Did."
She smiled, and I remembered that smile from a hundred candlelit nights, her hair splayed against the pillows, the bedsprings singing and the headboard like a castanet against the wall. "What's stopping you now?"

Lots of things.
Diana was dead. Lee was alive. I hadn't yet accepted my own death, and somehow believed I still had more in common with Lee. Not that I made a habit of comparing women. Each has her virtues and flaws, each of them are utterly beguiling and beyond understanding, and I never understood why love was supposed to be a mutually exclusive condition. Love was a big thing, as wide and strange and complex as God, and who was I to attempt to explain it or contain it?

"You deserve someone better than me." There.
The perfect distancing mechanism.
Throw the fault back on myself, so she could feel good about rejection.

"I thought you were the best," she said. The hallway and the room had both grown cold, the lingering heat from the flames now faded. Funny how hot and cold, pain and anxiety, lust and disgust still affected me. You'd think the lack of a heartbeat would strip all those hollow, mortal things. Yet in a way, they seemed more vivid and intense, as if their ephemeral nature painted them in brighter colors, like dying leaves in autumn.

"I was maybe the best once," I said.
"The best for you.
But people change."

"People change even when they're dead." The smile came again, but this time it flickered. Fire crawled between her teeth. "But you'll learn about that the hard way."

The hard way.
Wasn't death difficult enough without an extra round of trials and tribulations? How cruel
was
this invisible God? "Look, Diana. I cared about you. I mean,
care
..."

"I still love you. I've always loved you."

Shit. I hate it when that happens.

"I don't think we have much in common anymore," I said.

"We're both dead." She sounded almost pleased, as if now I had no door to walk through, no competing lips to kiss, no warm bed on the other side of town to share with someone who asked fewer questions and demanded less attention. As if now we were the only two dead people in the world, and so were meant to be together.

I wondered if Diana knew about Lee. I didn't even meet my one true love until two years after my original one true love had straight-piped herself into a casket. This was an awkward moment.

"We're here, now, you and me, and that's as good as it gets," I said, and it sounded like a crappy come-on line even to me.
The desperation ploy.
We're doomed so let's sleep together. Or, we're doomed, so let's not bother.

"You don't even know where 'here' is," she said.

She was still naked, and I had trouble keeping my eyes on hers. My moist orbs wanted to wander, to make sure physical glories were untouched by the stain of passage. I had to remind myself that she had first manifested as a ball of indignant hellfire, not as a succulent sex kitten. This could all be a front. I knew how women were when they thought they wanted something.

Besides, the forms that had frolicked behind her in the flames had suggested well-oiled masculine muscles. She wasn't the type to go without company for too long. Perhaps the afterlife was like closing time at the meat market, when no one went home alone. Maybe she had recruited an army of admirers in the land where sin inspired no hesitation, promised no punishment, and perhaps offered the most eternal of rewards.

"Like you said, we're both dead." Repetition did not make the idea any easier to swallow.

"Except I've been dead longer," she said. "I've had time to wait for you.
Plenty of time to think and plan."

I thought time no longer existed in the afterlife, or at least not in any progressive sense, as evidenced by the contradictory clock. On Earth, you were always fed the company line that the afterlife was a fixed, unchanging state.
A place where it was too late to repent.
I'd always accepted that with some relief. After a few decades and a few ounces of lead in your chest, you get tired of saying "Sorry."

Yet here I was again. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

"You're still an arrogant asshole even dead," she said, the corners of her lips tucked up in a smirk. "You think my suicide was all about you."

The walls continued to close in, though now so slowly I no longer paid attention. I suppose I thought they were insubstantial, some sort of hallucination. After all, the fire had faded, the clerk and her desk had disappeared, and even the clock had taken a vacation. But the wall behind me bumped my ass and nudged me forward. Closer to Diana and those flames of hellfire she courted.

She was naked, all right, but somehow she produced some pages from nowhere, as if she had hidden pockets in the delightful folds of her flesh. The paper was immune to the flames, thin clay tablets etched with a familiar hand. Mine.

"Remember this classic?" She cleared her throat with a belch of sulfur and quoted my own words back to me. "'I'm tired of saying I'm sorry. The failure is mine, but it's a failure that haunts both of us. Cut me out of your
heart,
wipe my memory from your mind. Burn everything I ever touched. Change your goddamned sheets. I love you, but we can't have each other.'"

My words, hurled back at me via that flickering and wicked tongue, became the pathetic poetry of a serial loser. In my youth, I'd discovered that words had an effect on females. A few scribbles on ragged notepaper
could make a sneaky circumference of the classroom and find the right pair of soft hands. The brightest of women could fall victim to some carefully chosen sentences. It didn't matter how outrageous the lies were, all that mattered was the presentation. Something poets, players, and politicians all learned very early in their respective games.

"The first time we broke up," I said.

"We got better with practice."

"In everything."
There was an old song that said breaking up was hard to do, but I'd found the third time was the charm. Even poets go for the cliché once in a while.

"You know what happens to suicides here?"

I figured they probably carried their pain with them forever, but I was beginning to suspect we all did. At least until we reached that better land hinted at by my dead Jewish caseworker. If only I could find the door to the rapidly shrinking room, because Diana's heat was making me sweat. When you're dead, your sweat smells like gone-over goat cheese and has the consistency of tar. Besides, I couldn't think with Diana crowding my space. Some things never change, all right.

"Suicides need special redemption," I guessed.
"Because it's the most selfish of sins."

"Coming from the world's most self-centered prick, that means a lot." Her inflamed face flickered into a smirk.

"I already said I'm sorry. If there's anything else I can do to…help you cross over, pray for your absolution, whatever,
let
me know."

"Yes," she said. "You'll get your own mission. But my mission is to make your death as miserable as possible. I'll be haunting your every step. I'll follow you to Hell and back."

I had a feeling that if I ever wound up in Hell, it would be a one-way trip, for me if not for Diana. But the afterlife was turning out to be nothing like the preachers and
Hollywood
writers had painted it.

"I never stopped loving you," I said, and it was partly true.

The kindness hidden in the words must have had some sort of power, because the flames began fading just as the walls pressed close enough to force me up against her flesh. She was a
hottie
, all right. I could hear my skin sizzle beneath my suit, but there was no pain. No physical pain, but I was in anguish because I didn't know whether to wrap my arms around her, grab her wrists to keep her from slapping me, or try to ignore her. My sleepy little magic wand stirred in my pants. I guess maybe all of me wasn't dead.

The room was now the size of a mausoleum crypt. I closed my eyes and ignored the press of her figure, whispering some throwaway lines. "It was so hard to go on after you died," I said. "If I had known we'd have a second chance over here—"

"Then you would have waited for me?"

Well, a man's heart is like a beer mug. It doesn't stay empty for long. If you don't stop drinking, you never get a hangover.

"I would have waited," I lied.

"So we could try yet again."

I was close enough to kiss her lips, but I was put off by the fact that no breath issued from between them. "Honey, I think we've changed. People grow together or they grow apart."

"I know about
her
.
The other woman."

Shit. Well, it didn't make much difference. It's not like I was cheating on Diana, because we'd been on separate sides of life and death. But maybe cheating was a thing of the heart and not the flesh. I didn't know a damn thing about the heart, and precious little about the flesh.

Diana grinned, her lips bending like baby snakes. "You owe me, Richard. I don't know what it is yet, but you owe me."

Despite the radiation of her ethereal flesh, a chill raced up my spine. Did this mean she was the Devil?
Or just an agent of the pointy-tailed guy with the bad attitude?
Then again, Diana hadn't ever needed marching orders to mess with my head. She was a self-starter when it came to inflicting misery on me.

She looked over her shoulder as if summoned by an inaudible command.
"Got to go now, dear.
But I'll be back."

The walls began receding and Diana faded like the light of a candle that had been suffocated, leaving behind only an oily thread of smoke. I blinked as the room regained its former shape. As the clock, posters, and desk came back into focus, I thought of the pledge I'd made to Diana on that June afternoon.

Till death do us
part.

And then some.

Women didn't know anything about love, but they certainly understood possession.

***

2.

The clerk blinked. The clock on the wall had actually moved backwards three minutes, as if I had encountered Diana in a past life.