The Damned Read online

  This was the day we died.

  The movie that was playing at the Main Art Theatre—Dead Poets Society—told me. The front page of the Detroit News in a box on the corner mourning the latest indignity in baseball’s terrible summer (TIGERS FALL TO BLUE JAYS IN 8–3 LOSS: NO END TO SLIDE IN SIGHT). But it was the meticulous arrangement of these details, a mirroring of a day already lived, already gone, that made me certain that this was July 9, 1989. Our birthday.

  Ash rode ahead and I followed. I was even taller than I had been at sixteen so that my knees brushed against my chest with each rotation, my back hunched over the handlebars. Once or twice I caught a reflection of myself in a storefront window, tottering and comic as a circus bear. It would’ve been funny if I could recall what laughter was.

  Was it a quality of the air, the strange, color-eating fog? A detectable element some part of me registers but my mind cannot name that told me this is the afterlife? Had I noticed a glitch in the software that made that place only look like Royal Oak, Michigan; something that exposed it as “Royal Oak, Michigan”? Not a fake, exactly, but a secondary creation, a shade? It was Royal Oak drained of life, its texture, its inner illumination. It appeared to be a place for the living but only in that it was a mirror world for the dead.

  She didn’t turn to check if I was still there behind her, knowing I would be. Rising off my saddle for a sprint of speed over the rail lines that cross Main before it joined Woodward Avenue and we left Royal Oak behind.

  I looked to the right, beyond the interchange to the entrance of the Detroit Zoo. For the first time that morning—late afternoon? near-dusk?—I noticed something explicitly wrong. Behind its perimeter fence, a pillar of gray smoke rose over the zoo’s grounds, its purple water tower tilted to one side.

  And then the water tower fell.

  Like it was waiting for my eyes to witness it. My ears to hear the screech of the folding steel buttresses.

  “Ash!”

  My voice worked.

  Though I could hear myself clearly, she didn’t turn. Continued pedaling down the curving on-ramp and joined Woodward, pointed her bike south.

  That’s when I saw the man sitting on the curb.

  A felt cloak over his shoulders held in place with a knotted ribbon around his neck. Once-white gloves, now darkened and cracked. A black top hat, tall as a steamship chimney. A HAPPY BIRTHDAY! balloon held by a string between his legs. He let it go and it dropped straight to the pavement like a bag of sand.

  I recognized him. The magician who entertained kids at Royal Oak birthday parties, pulling silver dollars out of ears in backyards and rented halls and, as at mine, the zoo.

  He rose without looking at me. Flapped out the ends of his cloak in stagy self-introduction.

  He lifted his chin to reveal his face. Makeup thick as candle wax ending at his jawline, so that by comparison the skin of his throat appeared the color of uncooked sausage. A smile of yellow teeth that showed the sinew of torn flesh caught between them.

  I should have turned away from him, or pedaled harder to better my chances of avoiding his grasp. Instead, I stopped pedaling altogether. Rolled closer on a bent rear rim that moaned against the frame with each turn.

  His arms lifted out from his sides. Reaching.

  He smacked his gloved hands together at the same instant I passed. A trick that produced a dead bird—a dove—that he held by a wing. Waved it at me like a handkerchief in farewell, close enough that the tiny beak scratched the side of my face.

  Then he was behind me.

  The magician could have been charging in pursuit but I didn’t look back. I heard him, though. His awful laugh, a girlish titter, that came from ahead as much as behind.

  A block on I caught up to Ash, who grinned back, amused, like she’d witnessed nothing more remarkable than me spitting out a yellowjacket that had flown into my open mouth.

  We rolled on without talk, without need for water or food or rest. The gray clouds darkening as we went, threatening a rain that I somehow knew would never fall.

  I thought of Willa and Eddie. Or tried to. But no matter how hard I focused on them they remained at the corners of my thoughts. Their faces, even their names slipping away, becoming harder to grasp again each time they did. I wanted them with me—for the life they held, the proof of what I’d briefly managed to be—but after a time their presence caused more distress than comfort and in order to carry on I let them go altogether.

  Soon we were working through the half-mile stretch of Woodlawn Cemetery on the right side and the State Fairgrounds on the left, both weed-wild and empty. Yet even with the entering of this word to my mind—empty—there was motion to the right.

  Figures standing up and taking steps around the burial stones. Human shadows cast against the crematorium wall. Maybe a dozen people looking up at the sky, at their own feet, at us, in the reorienting way of those rising from a dream-riddled sleep.

  Only seconds later there were more of them.

  Two dozen. Three. And among those in burial clothes—dark suits and blouses and christening dresses—there were a handful of men in green overalls, working at the earth with shovels, building piles and slamming boots down on spade heads to make the first cut. Gravediggers. Working at plots with existing headstones. Not digging graves for bodies, but providing exit for those long dead.

  Our mother was buried there. Our father.

  My sister.

  I returned my eyes to the road ahead. Made myself hold them there.

  Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look . . .

  As we moved deeper into the city, aside from the absence of traffic, everything was the same as it was when we were sixteen and would have driven past the abandoned factories and schools with a kind of awe. Though it wasn’t awe I felt then, not the giddiness of a kid imagining faces in dark windows. This was stranger and, at the same time, more real than that. It wasn’t a ride we were on. It was a decision we were making. The closer we came to the black towers of the Ren Center the colder the air became, hardening and tasting of copper as it passed my tongue.

  And then I did see faces in the windows.

  Looking out at us with the dawning rage of property owners spotting trespassers on their land. One woman in a second-floor room of the Lafayette Motel cackled at me. A laugh I couldn’t hear, only see, despite the absence of glass in her window frame. Her waving hands lined with cracks of dried blood.

  The towers of downtown loomed on the far side of the entrenched Fisher Freeway. Most of them stood dark, though the red flight-warning lights over the Ren Center and the star atop the Fox Theatre’s tower were on, lone signals that communicated the opposite of welcome. We were close enough to see the pointed teeth of the enormous concrete tigers prowling the walls of Comerica Park.

  I shouted ahead for the first time in what felt like hours.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  Ash stopped. Rested her foot on the curb and waited for me to pull up next to her.

  “I want to show you something.”

  Even as she said it I felt I knew where we were. This place—this Detroit—was a passage. From Royal Oak to the river. My After to Ash’s.

  The Woodward Avenue we bumped along was a bridge that led to both the good place and the bad depending on which way you went and the reasons that brought you there. I was dead. This was death embodied as a version of my hometown. But there were different paths we could take from there.

  When I died at sixteen and drove down Woodward with my father it was a place of contentment and light. The best day I’d known to that point. But while this was the same place, the same street, it was different this time. And I knew where it would end if Ash was leading the way.

  “Where am I?”

  Something crossed her face. The briefest flinch that made it clear she had decided against a lie—“You’re in Detroit” or “This is only a dream”—and also against the hardest form of the truth—“You’re dead, Danny. This is death.”
/>   “You’re with me,” she said.

  She cycled on, and the words she’d spoken turned sour in my head. What might have been kindness, the assurance that I was here with someone I knew and loved, echoed instead as a statement of my entrapment, the impossibility of escape.

  You’re with me.

  I thought of Willa and Eddie again. Home. The loved ones held at an impossible distance, always partial, always fleeting, the same way the dead are for even the most devoted survivors.

  With the return of her name I saw Willa. A reassembly of her body and face as though a puzzle I’d told myself to memorize the solution to. There was a gut punch of longing that came with the recollection of her touch, a hurt I tried to hold on to, but after a moment it diffused the same as her image and was gone.

  Eddie stayed longer. All the ways he missed his dad and couldn’t say how or name the ways the broken parts of him might be fixed—all of it somehow made him more full in my mind there. As though his spirit belonged to the dead in equal measure to the living.

  Then Ash turned off Woodward and the change of direction wiped him away, too.

  Though I saw no fire anywhere, I choked on an intake of smoke. The air acrid with burning wood and paint. Hair and skin.

  I followed Ash onto Alfred Street as though compelled by a spell that overrode my own desperation to turn back, to leap from the bike and run blind into the grassy lots that separated the ruins that still stood in the fields where mansions were once lined, stone shoulder to stone shoulder. The street riddled with rocks so that the tires fought beneath me, the Raleigh leaping like a spooked horse.

  Ash got off her bike and let it fall in the street. For a moment she looked up at the façade of the great house she’d stopped in front of, as though silently conferring with something that waited inside.

  I watched as she walked up the steps to the front door. She only looked back at me after she’d turned the handle and pushed the door open a couple feet. Her hair pushed back by the sour air exhaled from within.

  She waited for me to come up and join her, seemed about to take a step into the house, but didn’t. Remained on the threshold with the cocked head and jutting hip of an impatient teenaged girl.

  But there was something else in the way she stood wholly outside of the house’s interior shadows. Like she not only wanted me to go in first, but couldn’t go in herself at all.

  Whatever was to be seen inside wasn’t for her. It was for me.

  I got off the bike. My feet took me to the bottom step.

  I was about to start up when I met my sister’s eyes. Saw, as though for the first time, what being twins meant for her. Suffering and wanting me to suffer, too.

  “Danny!”

  It was the fury of her voice that told me I was running.

  Away from the house, from her. A defiance I hadn’t expected of myself, didn’t think I was capable of. Because I wasn’t. Not on my own, anyway.

  A boy’s voice. Eddie’s.

  Run.

  Into the fields behind the house where the grass grew high as corn around the mounds of glass and brick. My eyes on the lights around the ballpark as they came on, one tower at a time. It let me see that the tigers on the stadium walls weren’t statues anymore but moving. Alive. Their tails the length of cars, flicking and snaking.

  The lights also let me see that one of the tigers, the biggest one positioned over the main gate, was missing.

  “DANNY!”

  Somewhere behind me Ash ran, too. Getting closer.

  The stadium lights a halo hovering in midair. It blinded me to what cut and slashed underfoot, what felt like bedsprings and rolled wire that almost brought me down.

  “DANNY! STOP!”

  I stopped.

  Not because Ash told me to. Because something stood in my way.

  Backlit by the stadium lights so I couldn’t see what it was, though it gave the impression of being an animal. A naturally occurring creature in the living world that, there, was deformed and enlarged. An obscenity. One with triangular ears and thrashing tail. So big there was no way around it.

  It stalked closer until its shadowed outline was all I could see. That, and its eyes. Red as brake lights.

  Run, Eddie whispered.

  I might have tried except Ash put her hands on my shoulders. Letting me know she was there, that there was nowhere I could go without her. Her cherry ChapStick breath blown cold against the back of my neck.

  I watched the tongue slip out from the monster’s mouth. The great legs lowering into a crouch.

  And then, with a soundless intake of breath—whether mine or Ash’s or the beast’s—it leapt.

  PART 2

  * * *

  The Acts of This Life

  13

  * * *

  The first time I remember returning from the other side, after the fire, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be back. If the place Ash tried to pull me to wasn’t so terrible, if it was something closer to my drive down Woodward Avenue with my dad, I would have preferred to stay in the After hands down. I had little to call my own in life, little to look forward to. People are what hold you in heaven or hell or wherever you’re destined to go. People are the anchors. And it’s true of the living world, too. People are the reason for wanting to stay or not really caring if this is your time to go.

  Back then, I didn’t have anybody other than my dad, who was half gone anyway.

  But this time it was different.

  WILLA AND EDDIE BARELY LEFT my side as I blacked in and blacked out over the—what? Days? Weeks? Time is unreadably stretched out on the serious postsurgical wards. It’s hard to say what’s a day or what’s a night when the course of things is measured in dressing changes and morphine hits. But though I told them to go home, that I’d be okay, the truth was it was good to see them for the lengthening stretches I was awake. Eddie especially. Eddie, whose voice was with me in the After, telling me to run.

  I took to sitting up in bed and reading to him. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A gift from me only two days before the picnic. He told me he’s seen the movie but liked the book better.

  It was a pleasure to watch him enjoy the story. But when I glanced up from the page I searched his face for something other than his interest in Narnia. I wanted to see if he recognized he was there with me in the After that Ash tried to drag me to. Part of him, reaching across.

  Did he really see the girl holding the soccer ball, squeezing the life out of it, out of me? Did he know? Or did I imagine it just as I imagined his presence in the field behind the house on Alfred Street, a link between worlds of my own making?

  I wasn’t sure.

  But sometimes I thought I saw a hint of knowledge in Eddie’s eyes, a slightly baffled recognition. Something had changed for him since what his mother called my “heart trouble,” something more than a good kid trying to be nice to a guy who doesn’t have much time left. If I had to guess I’d say he didn’t understand it, even if he was there.

  And if he was there, he needed to be protected. Not from the glimpse he might have had of the afterlife, but from her.

  ONCE I FELT UP TO it, in a moment when there was just the two of us in the room, I asked Willa what happened on Cambridge Common.

  She didn’t see much. One second I was kicking the ball around with Eddie and the next I’m on the ground. She called 911 and they were there almost instantly. Not that it made any difference. The way the one paramedic straddled me on the gurney, “trying to do a handstand” on my chest as a pair of firemen wheeled me to the ambulance, the radio calls to Mount Auburn Hospital with their Code-this and Emergency Cardio–that—none of it looked good. In fact, soon after my arrival, a trauma doctor scuffed into the waiting room to tell Willa she was sorry, they tried everything, but Mr. Orchard was gone.

  “Eddie took it hard. Took it weird,” Willa said. “Kind of spaced out, right? Staring out the window at the parking lot like he’s expecting someone he knows to show up. Not saying a word. S
o I left him where he was.”

  With me, I almost said.

  Maybe fifteen minutes passed. Willa, in a daze herself—we were having a picnic less than an hour ago! a Sunday in the park!—and beginning to think about what she might have to do next, what forms would need signing or statements she’d be expected to provide, didn’t understand at first what the trauma doctor meant when she came back to say there’d been “some unexpectedly positive developments.” It turns out that while she’d been out here telling Willa that her “husband” was dead, a cardiac team had taken over and opened the patient up. Put a stent into a severely blocked valve. Paddled the heart from inside the chest cavity.

  “He’s back now,” Eddie said before the doctor could.

  “Yes,” she said, with something like regret, as though admitting the loss of a bet. “That would appear to be the case.”

  WHEN I WAS ABLE TO talk to the cardiac surgeon myself a couple days later he couldn’t help congratulating the both of us.

  “Well, we did it, Danny,” he said, shaking my hand. “We goddamned did it.”

  I liked him not only for saving my life but for being a doctor of the kind they don’t seem to make many of anymore, the ones who’ve seen pretty much everything, but who are still frequently amazed by how things can turn out.

  “The human heart. An incredible machine, no doubt about it,” he said, shaking his head. “But the human mind? That’s what makes outcomes like yours happen. Your heart? It was finished. It was a crushed soda can in there. But here you are.”

  “Here I am,” I said, which, for the first time, opened the gates to grateful tears. The surgeon’s seen those before, too. He shook his head again.