The Telephone of the Dead

Marnie Gottfried's husband, Steve, had been dead for two weeks when he called her for the first time. She had just returned from Israel, hadn't even unpacked, was as unhinged and raw as she would ever be, and the telephone call sent her windmilling to a therapist. When she mentioned the telephone call to the polite little man, he prescribed something, but even after she was regularly swallowing antihallucinogenic chemicals, the calls continued. In fact, she got a three-thousand-dollar telephone bill, collect charges from an 800 service distressingly called The Telephone of the Dead. She didn't share this with the therapist, surmising—quite correctly—that he would think she was hooked up with some necrophiliac outfit.

Her husband had come home in a summer storm, the clouds boiling like a pot of scummy soup, his little Citroën pulling between the pines as she bent to wring out the mop in the kitchen. The lightning was directly overhead, had—in fact—hit the chimney again and fried the computer. She was growing tired of changing the surge protector, bored with the childlike scream the computer made when struck by lightning. It simply wasn't true that lightning didn't strike the same place twice. It had favorite places, places like their chimney and their pines, where it loved to run riot, cavort wantonly, drive deeply into the earth again and again like a serial rapist.

It was sensible of Steve not to try to make it to the house through an electrical storm. She peered out the kitchen window at the car, waved, but couldn't see a thing. The rain vomited down, uncontrollable, the thunderous belly noises deafening, truly. She finished mopping the floor, dumped the water down the drooling toilet and was heating up the meatloaf when Steven opened the back door.

"I think I've been hit by lightning," he said, in an odd high voice strung through with glass. Freshets of water ran from his clothes onto her brilliantly waxed floor, and he held his arm out to her. On the soft, white part, just below the elbow, was a red circle, covered with a bunch of soggy tissues. She reached out to brush them off but he screamed, "Don't! It's my skin, Marnie!" The fur on his arm was gone except for a few shriveled hairs that turned to ash as she watched.

"I told you not to go out in a storm," she said. "I warned you."

He looked at her strangely, not at all with his usual obsequious good humor.

"I think I died," he said, cradling his arm and rocking slowly forward and back. He still stood, dripping on her floor. His hair noodled down his face and into his eyes.

"You're just being melodramatic," she said, "Put those clothes in the bathroom. You're ruining the floor. How did you really burn your arm? Starbucks?"

"No," he said, "Something hit me. I fell flat on my back. I was looking up at the trees, the rain all but drowning me. I felt some part of me lift up out of my body, out of my eyes, but I could still see the house and Polly in her crib and you. You were waxing the floor."

It gave her a jolt when he said that. He never noticed anything in the house. It wasn't even a good guess because he had no clue that she ever cleaned the floors. He thought they stayed sanitary through sheer force of will. He thought shirts arrived from the Garden of Eden, freshly starched and lined up in his closet, clinking and jostling to be first in line. He hadn't graduated from magical thinking.

"There was a bright light. I know this sounds like everyone else's story, people who almost die, but it really happened. I was pulled along toward the light, and I could taste things in the air. Colors. I don't know. The further I went, the better I felt—light and free and warm, so warm. By God! It was...