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the bar cabinet, I realized that I was still clutching blossoms in my hand. I
threw them down on the floor and scrubbed my palm on my pants as though I had
been handling something foul. I went to the bedroom with the Jack Daniel's
and drank myself unconscious, refusing to face up to the reason why I needed
to drink at all. I told myself that it had nothing to do with the cherry
trees, that I was drinking only because I needed to escape the misery of the
past few years. Mine was a diamond-hard obsession.
* * * I slept for eleven hours and woke with a hangover. I
took two aspirin, stood in the shower under scalding water for fifteen
minutes, under a cold spray for one minute, toweled vigorously, took two more
aspirin, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Through the window above
the sink, I saw the cherry trees ablaze with pink and white blossoms.
Hallucination, I thought with relief. Yesterday's blizzard of blossoms was
just hallucination. I ran outside for a closer look at the trees. I saw
that only a few pink-white petals were scattered on the lush grass beneath the
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boughs, no more than would have blown off in the mild spring breeze.
Relieved but also curiously disappointed, I returned to the kitchen. The
coffee had brewed. As I poured a cupful, I remembered the blossoms that I had
cast aside in the library. I drank two cups of fine Colombian before I had
the nerve to go to the library. The blossoms were there: a wad of crushed
petals that had yellowed and acquired brown edges overnight. I picked them up,
closed my hand around them. All right, I told myself shakily, you don't
have to believe in Christ or in God the Father or in some bodiless Holy
Spirit. Religion is a disease. No, no, you don't have to believe in any
of the silly rituals, in dogma and doctrine. In fact you don't have to believe
in God to believe in an afterlife. Irrational, unreasonable. No, wait,
think about it: Isn't it possible that life after death is perfectly natural,
not a divine gift but a simple fact of nature? The caterpillar lives one life,
then transforms itself to live again as a butterfly. So, damn it, isn't it
conceivable that our bodies are the caterpillar stage and that our spirits
take flight into another existence when our bodies are no longer of use to us?
The human metamorphosis may just be a transformation of a higher order than
that of the caterpillar. Slowly, with dread and yet hope, I walked through
the house, out the back door, up the sloped yard to the cherry trees. I stood
beneath the flowery boughs and opened my hand to reveal the blossoms that I
had saved from yesterday. "Benny?" I said wonderingly. The blossomfall
began again. From both trees, the pink and white petals dropped in profusion,
spinning lazily to the grass, catching in my hair and on my clothes. I
turned, breathless, gasping. "Benny? Benny?" In a minute the ground was
covered with a white mantle, and again not one small bloom remained on the
trees. I laughed. It was a nervous laugh that might degenerate into a mad
cackle. I was not in control of myself. Not quite sure why I was speaking
aloud, I said, "I'm scared. Oh, shit, am I scared." The blossoms began to
drift up from the ground. Not just a few of them. All of them. They rose back
toward the branches that had shed them only moments ago. It was a blizzard in
reverse. The soft petals brushed against my face. I was laughing again,
laughing uncontrollably, but my fear was fading rapidly, and this was good
laughter. Within another minute, the trees were cloaked in pink and white
as before, and all was still. I sensed that Benny was not within the tree.
This phenomenon did not conform to pagan belief any more than it did to
traditional Christianity. But he was somewhere. He was not gone forever. He
was out there somewhere, and when my time came to go where he and Ellen had
gone, I only needed to believe that they could be found, and then I would
surely find them. The sound of an obsession cracking could probably be
heard all the way to China. A scrap of writing by H. G. Wells came into my
mind. I had long admired Wells's work, but nothing he had written had ever
seemed so true as that which I recalled while standing under the cherry trees:
"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is
but the twilight of the dawn." He had been writing about history, of
course, and about the long future that awaited humanity, but those words
seemed to apply as well to death and to the mysterious rebirth that followed
it. A man might live a hundred years, yet his long life will be but the
twilight of the dawn. "Benny," I said. "Oh, Benny." But no more blossoms
fell, and through the years that followed I received no more signs. Nor did I
need them. From that day forward, I knew that death was not the end and
that I would be rejoined with Ellen and Benny on the other side. And what
of God? Does He exist? I don't know. Although I have believed in an afterlife
of some kind for ten years now, I have not become a churchgoer. But if, upon
my death, I cross into that other plane and find Him waiting for me, I will
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