Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak Read Free Book Online

informed of this last reaction. “She finds the scent of apples repulsive?” he asked. And Helena shrugged, throwing her hands in the air.
    “She has to eat, Paul,” said Helena. She lay on the white leather couch in the living room, her head on the armrest, her feet elevated on pillows, exhausted. She’d been bustling around for the past two days with more energy than Paul had seen in her for the past year. Whenever she wasn’t in the bathroom with the mermaid, she was fixing up the house. Patching cracks in the walls, polishing furniture, upending reclining chairs to sweep beneath them. There was so much to be done, she murmured as she went. She had let it all go, it had all gone astray.
    “Let me have a try,” Paul offered. Helena had been staring at the ceiling, at a brown spider-shaped waterstain she wanted to erase, but she turned her head toward him when he spoke.
    “ Yo u ?” She squinted at him.
    “Yes , m e ,” Paul said. “I’ll take care of it.” Then he rose from his chair, grabbed his jacket from the hall closet, and left the house.
     
    Paul sincerely wanted to help. Even though he was still angry with Helena, he couldn’t stand to see her banging her head against walls over that creature. He’d been hoping she’d stop playing these games with herself. Over a month ago, he’d found a journal she’d been keeping secretly, in which she wrote long florid letters to their daughter. Or in which she wrote down detailed memories she wanted to capture before forgetting. He had found an entry that read: “My memories flash over my mind, like lightning briefly illuminating a dark landscape.” He hadn’t known his wife was a poet. He still didn’t know if she was a good one or not. And he had found: “Dearest Jordan, I miss you so. When are you coming home? I found a coffee stain the other day and thought of you. Perhaps you made it, before you left? I’m not mad, though. We’ll get new carpet! It’ll be an excuse.”
    She collected old newspaper clippings, stories from over two decades before, now yellowed with age. Articles detai ling the resurfacing of the merfolk. They had come with a message, although it took months for translations to occur. They didn’t use words but spoke with squeals and clicks, like whales and dolphins. They were sad, they said. So sad to see us still walking on land. It looked painful and exhausting. And why, they wondered, did we continue to put ourselves through this self-imposed exile? It tortured them to see us torturing ourselves. Come home, they said. You’ve proven your point. All is forgiven.
    They had disappeared soon after arriving, had only stay a few months. And soon after, people began disappearing as well. Or so it was said. Paul knew that Helena considered this to be a poss ibility with Jordan: that she’d gone down beneath the waves to join them. “Others have,” Helena said. “A girl who lived down the street from me did. Martha. Martha Pechanski.”
    But Paul didn’t believe Jordan chose that route. A year ago now—the last time he saw her—she’d been living with a group of squatters in an abandoned tenement in LA. A friend of Jordan’s had phoned him, or someone who had once been a friend, and said she no longer attended classes at UCLA. That she’d hooked into a group, a bad group, the friend said. And that this is where you will find her.
    Paul went one day, without Helena, and found Jordan in a dreary room, wearing stained jeans (stained with what, he couldn’t tell) and a threadbare T-shirt with the wor d Billabon g fading on its front. She’d been a surfer, and still had her board with her even then. Her hair was matted into dull and frizzy coils, almost dreadlocks. He shivered, seeing her like this. “Why?” he had asked. And she had replied, stroking the board that lay across her lap, “Because it’s all a lie.” He asked what she was talking about, he wanted her to tell him what it was that was all a lie, but Jordan would