The 31 Near Death Experiences of Jenny Black Read online

  The 31

  Near Death

  Experiences

  of Jenny Black

  A novel

  F.E. Shearer

  Copyright © 2022 F.E. Shearer

  All rights reserved

  Pumpjack Press

  Portland, Oregon

  ISBN: 978-1734519754

  Cover design: Ashley Ruggirello/Cardboard Monet

  To /CH, always

  Thank you

  CHAPter ONE

  Loretta Sparkman looks through the window at a pair of winter finches perched on the wooden bird feeder, a light snow dusting their feathers, and waits for the reaction from Matthias to the news she is becoming a zombie. He hasn’t said anything for close to a minute and she wonders if maybe she should have phrased her announcement differently, if another word choice could have crystallized her intent more sharply. Had she gone the right way with the simple, straightforward ‘Matthias, I’m becoming a zombie?’ The birds flutter off. She turns to face Matthias. He’s sitting in the big red chair, the one that’s hard to get out of because of the broken springs. He was reading, but no longer. He closes the book and sets it on his lap.

  “Right this second?” he asks.

  “That’s a fair question, and no, not right this second. It started a while ago, and it’s a work in progress, but I’d say it’s pretty close to done.”

  “What exactly does ‘becoming a zombie’ mean?”

  “Another reasonable question. Suffice it to say the sense of who I am, my identity, is disappearing, barely there anymore, to be honest,” she says, wishing she could slow her words down. They are coming out at the speed of early summer rain, too fast.

  He leans back in the chair and locks his long fingers behind his head. The book slides from his lap onto the carpet. The cover is pale blue, the pages are dog-eared; she can’t quite make out the title, something about life on Mars?

  “Go on, you’ve got my full attention,” he says.

  His tender response calms her, and she takes a breath, thinks about how to best describe what’s been happening, how to explain that the zombie is a useful albeit imperfect proxy for her state of being, or rather, absence of being, and how despite certain cartoonish limitations, in particular the brain-eating part, she is impressed by its metaphorical prowess, the insidiously clever way a zombie prioritizes reaction over intent in the consideration of self.

  “I’m certainly not hungry for brains. And it’s not that my ability to think and be smart and read and talk and love and so on is gone. It’s just, I’m no longer sure who’s doing that stuff anymore. Like, there’s no ‘I’ inside me.”

  “You don’t feel anything?”

  “I feel things but in an instinctive way, a reaction to whatever is happening around me, without having any sense, or minimal sense, of who or what is doing the reacting.”

  “Who then is having this conversation with me?”

  “Try not to take this too literally. I’m not making some lofty philosophical argument about identity,” she says. “But I need to be honest with you about what’s happening because while you recognize me, I don’t, except as it relates to the present moment. I mean, I know who I am relative to you and to my job, and as Sally-Anne’s mother, of course, and I’m sure when Jenny gets here, I’ll slip into a pre-constructed Jenny-module.”

  “So, ‘you’ have become situational?” he asks.

  “That’s close, but not exactly. Better to say an ‘I’ isn’t needed to do the things that need doing. Instead, it’s straight-up reaction to stimuli like, well, a zombie that slumps along responding to whatever it is they respond to,” she says. “Of course, there are gray zones, it’s not that all of me is simply gone. But here’s the most important part, the kicker…”

  She pauses. Loretta isn’t intentionally trying to build suspense but it’s clear Matthias is taking it that way. His eyes widen as he raises his naked eyebrows.

  “I don’t miss me,” Loretta says.

  “Not at all?”

  “Not at all. Turns out, life works fine in reaction mode, everything is simpler. Frankly, it’s liberating.”

  “I see the attraction of a simpler life, but I suspect there’s more going on. Do you think maybe this could be a precursor to a coming bout of depression?” he asks. He keeps his voice even, wanting his question to land gently.

  Loretta has been depressed once or twice—well, more than that, if she’s honest, which isn’t always easy when it comes to depression. The last time she stayed in bed for a full week and ate only tomato soup and dry sourdough toast, but that’s not what’s going on now. Still, it’s sweet he’s checking. Matthias is kind that way, she thinks, kindness is his default setting. She’s lucky he sticks with her.

  “I’m not depressed, I’m the opposite of depressed,” she says. “I’m neutral. If there’s no one home inside anymore, who would have those feelings?”

  “Seems the opposite of depressed might be joyful, not neutral,” he says.

  “I don’t think anyone would say zombies are known for feelings of joyfulness.”

  He smiles and it still gives Loretta a flutter in her stomach, even now, after twenty-three years, seven months and seventeen days of marriage, even in her zombie state of mind. Or lack of mind.

  “Here’s one more possibility, but don’t take it the wrong way,” he says.

  “Go on.”

  “Maybe this is a midlife crisis. You’re the right age, going through some hard stuff with me, you’re burned out at your job, your nest is newly empty.”

  “That’s a shallow narrative, Matthias, and you know it. Zombie fits the evidence and situation far better.”

  Loretta crosses her legs at the ankles, and then uncrosses them. She wonders if this confession was a mistake but she needs him to understand. It’s crucial for his well-being.

  He says, “You’re always tired from work, plus taking care of me. You don’t have to dress it up with zombies. I can help, I want to help. Or we can get you help from someone else. We can figure this out together.”

  She says, “There’s nothing to figure out, that’s the entire point. I’m not upset about this and you shouldn’t be either.”

  They startle at the sound of the almost-broken doorbell, a stretched-out corrugated noise, as if the sounds are trying but failing to convey meaning.

  “You ready?”

  “Zombies are always ready. That’s the beauty of it. No need to plan, no thought, every moment is pure reaction.”

  Loretta stands and raises her arms, groaning and stumbling into the hallway. Matthias laughs, but without conviction. She ends the zombie mimicry before opening the front door.

  Seconds later, Jenny Black explodes into the house in a whirl of frosted air. She shrugs a damp backpack off her tiny body onto the floor. Matthias’s cheerful hello is drowned out as the women hug and share news at a hyper speed—what have you been up to, are you seeing anyone, how’s your health, how is Sally-Anne, has it really been six years, how time flies, yes, yes, I am starving, how did you guess?

  They keep talking, interrupting each other and then laughing about that, and circling seamlessly back to pick up the orphaned threads. Loretta hangs Jenny’s coat in the hall closet and Matthias carries her pack upstairs after calling in their takeout order. Loretta waits while Jenny freshens up, dabbing on pink lipstick and face powder to tone down her chilled red cheeks. When she finishes, they hug again, longer this time. Loretta grabs a box of wine from the fridge and leads Jenny into the back room that used to be an outside porch until two years ago when Matthias put up walls and glass and turned it into a sunroom. A drafty sunroom—the east wall isn
’t quite level with the floor and cold air streams through baseboard cracks. The windows look out over a postage-stamp yard—two sides are wire-fenced and divide their tiny parcel of land from two other tiny parcels belonging to neighbors on either side; the third is the brick backside of a low-rise apartment building. A cherry tree, bare this time of year, rises alone from the center, its bark shimmering against the angled sunlight. The snowfall has slowed, delicate lace-flakes appearing and disappearing in the evening air, floating, never seeming to reach the ground, evident only by the shallow muddiness left behind.

  Loretta and Jenny sit face to face on a brown velvet sofa, the arms worn bald. Loretta spreads a plaid blanket over their laps to ward off the chill. Jenny tucks her legs beneath her body as Loretta stretches her legs out straight because they don’t bend like that anymore.

  “It is good to have you here, Jenny. It’s been way too long.”

  “I’m relieved to be here.”

  Relieved is an interesting word, Loretta thinks. “I like your short hair, it’s a nice style on you. You look beautiful and, well, luminous,” Loretta says. “You’re lit up like a movie star, but from the inside out.”

  “Thanks, that’s a nice thing to hear.”

  “Ready for a glass of wine?”

  “I’m not drinking, Lolo,” Jenny says, lapsing into Loretta’s childhood nickname. “And I know you won’t mind if I’m honest, but you don’t look so great. Kind of exhausted, and your eyes are all puffy. I mean, you’re still beautiful, but what’s going on?”

  Loretta leans over the coffee table, the one she painted canary yellow this past summer with leftover paint she found outside the hardware store, and fills her own wine glass nearly to the rim. She considers telling Jenny about becoming a zombie. But she isn’t sure Jenny will understand, and while understanding isn’t paramount, the chore of explanation is more than she’s ready to undertake, and so Loretta redirects.

  “Time and gravity catching up with me, I suppose. Now come on, tell me everything, world traveler. Let’s hear the details of your latest adventure and your plans for the coming year,” she says. Loretta raises her glass. “Cheers to a new year, even if we are a few months late celebrating. May this new decade be the most perfect either of us have ever experienced. Here’s to 2020.”

  The wail of an ambulance pierces her one-sided toast. As they wait for the sound to pass, Loretta looks through the window at a bird flying low across the late-day sky; its distant body creates an exacting line of punctuation against the flat winter clouds. The siren fades into the background.

  “A crow?” Jenny asks.

  “Could be a hawk,” Loretta says.

  Jenny chews on her lower lip and then says, “I do have one adventure to talk about.”

  “I’m all ears,” Loretta says. “Spill.”

  “Brace yourself, this is big.”

  Loretta takes a long sip of wine, finishing nearly a third of the glass in one swallow. “I’m braced.”

  “Have you ever had a near death experience?”

  Loretta is expecting a story about a new lover or a stint in rehab or an exotic destination, but she manages to keep the surprise off her face and answers Jenny’s question. “The last time I was on a plane, a few months ago, we hit a turbulent patch, and I was sure I was going to die, and then one time…”

  “No, no, not that, not having a bad scare or thinking you might die. The other thing. When you go through a tunnel, float above your body, see dead relatives, your life flashes before you.”

  “People who come back from the dead and say they’ve seen heaven or something?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “I’ve never had one,” Loretta says. “Have you?” She finishes her wine, sets the empty glass down on the floor and cracks her knuckles.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “When you were twenty-two?”

  “No, I’ve had twenty-two near death experiences.”

  “I don’t understand. Have you almost died twenty-two times?” Loretta asks, confused.

  “I wasn’t dead, or even almost dead, during any of them.”

  “But don’t these things require being almost dead, or even really dead for a bit, hence their name?”

  “It’s not that way for me. I’m just sitting around going about my life, or doing nothing, hanging out, then with no warning, boom, I fall through all the way to the other side, the other side of death.”

  “The other side of death?”

  Jenny’s words tumble out. “I know it sounds nuts but when it happens, I go to this place, not a physical place, it’s different, everything is there and also nothing. It’s hard to describe but each time I travel to the other side of, well, it must be the other side of death, what else could it be, because I’m flying through a tunnel—”

  Loretta moves close to Jenny, as if extreme proximity will help fathom her meaning. Their shared blanket slips to the floor. “Flying to the other side of death? Jenny, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Not flying like on a plane, more like a bird, but not even that … shit, I wish I were better at describing this. It’s fuzzy like a dream. Once I get through the tunnel and beyond the light and see people I know from before they died, when I get past all that, that’s when it all happens. It’s beautiful, so much love is there, time stops. I’m blessed, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted, like my entire life’s journey has been worth it. But still, even though I’m happy about this, I’m not sure what’s going on. Why do I keep having these things without dying?”

  Jenny stops talking. She takes in a deep breath, exhaling slowly. Loretta leans back into the sofa cushions, not speaking, the mechanical purr of the electric space heater the only sound fastening their silence. Loretta stares at the orange coils, wondering if Jenny is sick, like maybe she has a rare neurological disease or has had a bunch of silent strokes, or maybe living such a solitary life has taken a toll on her mental health.

  Finally, Loretta breaks their quiet. “Twenty-two?”

  “Yes,” Jenny says.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “After the third one, but he didn’t understand, or more likely didn’t believe me. I asked him to do a full physical and whatever brain scans he needed. Had to pay out of pocket.”

  “And?”

  “Totally healthy.”

  “Are you scared?” Loretta asks.

  “I’m not scared so much as blown away,” Jenny says, picking at the cuticle around her thumb. “Well, maybe a little scared.”

  “Food’s here,” Matthias calls.

  Loretta stands and pulls Jenny up by her small hands with their bitten-down fingernails. “Wow. I’m not sure how else to react yet.”

  “Yeah, like I said, it’s big.”

  Loretta wraps her arms around Jenny’s shoulders, and despite a rising unease for her friend’s state of mind, or perhaps because of it, falls effortlessly into the familiarity of Jenny’s body, and images of the long-ago girls they once were unlock from her memory, agile and awkward children playing together, emotions at the surface, reacting to the freshness of each moment, blissfully free of the burden of time or purpose.

  Loretta has a flash: maybe her zombieness means she has come full circle, maybe this is what it means to get old?

  A few minutes later, Matthias, Loretta and Jenny sit around the dining room table, scratched up by two decades of a mostly happy family life, a space now infrequently used after Sally-Anne left for college three years ago. Now, when they are alone, Matthias and Loretta eat on trays in front of the television and watch old westerns, true-crime shows or BBC mysteries.

  Tonight, the friends slide into an easy enough banter. They trade Chinese takeout cartons and Jenny fills them in on where she’s been living the last few years. Jenny loves to swim—she is a strong swimmer and was competitive enough for an Olympic trial before she broke her shoulder goofing on a trampoline in high school. She has always seen the world, and describes her travels, through the le
ns of coastlines and lakes and rivers, and the ease, or not, of swimming in their waters. After finishing a rambling story about the buoyancy of the Aegean Sea on the Izmir side of Turkey, Jenny stops talking, fixes her eyes on Matthias and asks about his health. He is bald and very thin, so different from the last time she visited.

  Loretta would love more than anything not to talk about this, but Matthias can’t be stopped and launches into his diagnosis and the months of treatment. He tries hard to make them laugh, and succeeds when he goes into way too much detail about his vomit-diary as they finish up the tofu stir-fry.

  “He’s fine now,” Loretta insists. “Totally fine. There is zero to worry about. Except his persistent need to describe the most disgusting parts.”

  “You look very distinguished bald,” Jenny says.

  “Liar.” Matthias runs his hand over his bare chalky-white scalp. “But I do consider it my own personal work of art.”

  He says this because eleven months ago, two days before the first chemo, Matthias announced—using a fake high-pitched voice to imitate an imaginary museum director or art critic—he would shave his own head, a form of performance art, rather than be turned into a passive symbol of medical deconstructionism. Standing naked in the bathtub, Loretta lathered his head, giggling at his silliness, but really pantomiming courage.

  “How about we get back to near death experiences,” Loretta says, interrupting Matthias because she can tell he is on the verge of telling that story to Jenny.

  “Near death experiences?” Matthias asks.

  “Jenny is having a lot of them.”

  “How interesting,” he says, cocking his head to the left.

  “Start at the beginning,” Loretta says.

  Uncertainty washes across Jenny’s face, and a furrow deepens between her eyebrows.

  “Where does anything begin? How far back? To our childhood? The beginning could be anywhere. I can’t see from the future into the past where maybe there was a trigger, a decision I made, something I ate—”