Leaving Limbo

The walls of heaven are higher than the Mexican border walls probably are in the current president's wet dreams. Or at least, the president when Eli died. It's been anywhere between a month and twenty years by his own estimation, that he's been suspended in this weird kind of reality in which sleep and waking take turns like identical twins doing a baton pass.

During what he thinks of as the sleeping, images play on the insides of his eyelids like a silent movie theater. He dreams of the spinning wheel at the smoke-filled casino, Ana's face filled with tears as she screams words on mute. Most of all, he dreams of that night, her voice on the phone, that distant, unattainable quality it had that made him cold. We have to talk. Then he's digging in the closet, emerging with the ring he stuffs, box and all, into his pocket before he gets in the car. Behind the wheel, the night splits into two, the lights in the barren motel parking lot dividing and multiplying so they look like the oncoming beams from a UFO. Shouldn't drive. The thought is clear as day in his otherwise muddled, racing mind. He doesn't heed its wisdom. Instead, he backs over the curb and peels out, headed for a destination he'll never reach.

That's the sleeping. Just a constant replay like the film in a stuttering, broken reel, black and white memories on loop. It always cuts out before the impact, the sudden sickening crunch that cut his lifeline and sent him here to this twilit no-man's land.

When Eli hears the scuff of wood on sand, his eyes snap open and he sits up: this is the part he knows as the waking.

As always, he’s in a little boat, bobbing half-perched on the smooth, unmarked sand of some kind of beach. As always, the wall stretches away in front of him, just a few yards from where the gentle water laps at the land. He cannot see its end in any direction. It's like he's literally come to the end of the world, flat after all like all those crazy holy rollers thought, and this giant steel expanse was put in place by some benevolent god to keep people from falling off the edge.

No sooner does he have the thought than he sees them, moving out of the mist on his left, approaching in their white robes. There are three of them this time, these weird monk-like apparitions.

He thinks they might be some version of angels. The people in white have never told him this; they haven't really said anything that points to any type of digestible faith. Eli, who grew up with a mother whose belief in the Catholic religion was only surpassed by her belief in the bottle to cure life's ills, is admittedly filling in the blanks here.

As they stand to face him in a line spread out across the sand, the middle one says, in a flat, toneless voice, "Rise, Elias Donovan."

Eli sighs, turning his head to listen to the water lapping at the bottom of his skiff.

His tired defiance doesn't last long. Eli feels his body move against his own control, his legs bending and his spine lengthening, pulling him up to a standing position. The little boat rocks, and he steps out the side of it, his bare feet splooshing in the tepid water. Eli faces the white-garbed figures once more, and sees that their faces have changed since the last time. The one in the middle resembles his absent father. The leftmost figure looks a little like Mark, the manager of the bar where he used to work, and the one on the right bears a resemblance to his high school math teacher Ms. Abrams.

"You cannot proceed without your ticket," Ms. Abrams says, and Eli gets hit with a strong wave of deja-vu. His arms hang limp by his sides like those of a puppet; he moves them to grope at the pockets of his bloodstained shorts. A sliver of windshield glass slides from the fabric to the ground. There's nothing inside.

"He doesn't have it," the Mark lookalike says, shaking his head, tutting.

Eli feels anger course through him. "I don't know what you freaks are talking about," he says. "I don't know why you keep waking me up, fucking with me like this, but I don't even want to be here-“

"You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to be," Mark says, studying his nails nonchalantly, like he did the night he fired Eli.

Ms. Abrams leans forward, smiling dreamily. “This is happening in your head, after all," she whispers in his ear.

His father's hands tighten on his shoulders.

"Admission denied," he says firmly, and he pushes. Eli flails, falling backward, but he never hits the water below. Instead, his vision goes black and he plummets, down, down like a sack of rocks thrown down an elevator shaft. His Catholic-schooled brain has time to think I'm going to hell before he hits the ground, rolling over fallen leaves.

The smell of autumn assaults his senses. Somewhere close by, a bird trills, and Eli feels his ears perk up. He gets up on all fours and opens his eyes; a forest stares back at him, dappled in chilly sunlight. He feels the burnt embers of nostalgia stir in his inhuman chest: he knows this place. Before he can put a name to it, there's another sound from far off: the crunching of feet over leaves. Two feet, this new mammalian brain reports to him. Human.

Someone approaches.

.

Ana walks carefully over the muddy trail, her breath appearing as a fine vapor as it leaves her lips. It's early November, teetering on the precipice of the mad rush towards the end of the year, and her mind is stuffed full, whirring ever since the morning Mandy kneeled on the sunlit floor of their studio apartment and said, Let's get married. What she didn't say, but what Ana knew she wanted to, was, I'm tired of waiting for you to forgive yourself.

At the sight of Mandy's outstretched hand, looking into her clear blue eyes, she'd wanted nothing more than to say the word yes, to fall into the arms of her girlfriend of two years and keep plummeting forward into the future, freed from the oppressive limbo she'd been in since Eli died.

Instead, she said, I need time.

.

And now she is alone, early in the post-dawn hours, walking on a faded trail to a place she hasn't been since she was young. She follows the yellow slashes of paint, faded from the years, until she hits the clearing she remembers, and stops.

The branches rattle in a furtive breeze as she looks upon the disused play-set. The metal slide is spotted heavily with rust and the swings' blue plastic seats are faded and cracked, rotted leaves collected where the children of Avon Park used to play.

She was maybe ten the last time she'd been here, which, she realizes with a start, would make it nearly fifteen years since she's been back. The very first time, she was seven, and playing on those swings, when she fell and skinned her knee. Alone in the clearing, her parents at the grill by the pond yards away, she'd begun to cry, more from the shock of the fall than the actual pain.

"Don’t cry."

She looked up and a boy with golden-red hair approached. Most of the boys in Ana's class at school would have mocked her display of distress, and she stiffened at his words, but he didn't laugh. He dropped to his knees beside her and up close she could see that his eyes were a pretty hazel-green.

"I got Spider Man bandaids," he said, and reached into his pocket to fish out an assortment, crinkled in their white wrappings. "Go on," he said, "Pick."

She chose one at random, and he unwrapped it, applying it to her knee with the precision of a confident surgeon, tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth.

"There," he said when he was finished. "Like it never happened."

She looked down at her knee and back up at his face. In her shock, her tears had gone completely.

"I'm Eli," the boy said, undeterred by her silence. "What's your name?"

.

That day heralded the beginning of a friendship that spanned her entire childhood and beyond. Eli Donovan, she learned, lived down the street from Avon Park, where she and her parents began to come often in the summer months. She never saw any evidence of his parents, and when she'd asked he'd said they were broken up, and his mother slept and drank iced tea all summer. 'She won't notice I'm gone,' he'd said, and for a moment his carefree smile had flickered before coming back to life.

Eventually, her parents moved a distance and stopped going to Avon Park in the summers. Around the same time, Ana started middle school and was elated when she realized Eli was in her grade, their adjacent districts pushed together into one building. He was a joker in school, and well-liked, and inevitably drew the attention of romantic admirers as they aged. At their eighth-grade graduation dance, she asked him to go with her before anyone else could, and they had their first kiss under the spinning lights in the auditorium. They went steady through high school, but their paths diverged when Ana went away to college and Eli, who'd barely managed to graduate, stayed home to work at the local grocery store.

In college, Ana dated several men and a couple women, but only casually. Upon graduating, she moved back closer to home, getting an apartment in New York City. It was there that she and Eli crossed paths on the subway, and just like that, the gap between them disappeared like it had never happened. Eli did bartending and standup comedy; Ana had a good job in publishing. At first they lived separately before moving in together to save money when their leases were up. They lived an exciting, fast-paced life in those days, attending shows, staying out late and enjoying the night life. They both did everything in excess: spending, sex, drinking. It was only after they'd moved back closer to home, away from the city lights, that Ana realized maybe Eli had an actual problem.

She'd gotten an apartment near her childhood home, so she could help her parents care for her Abuela, who was ill. Away from the bars and nightclubs, she quickly adjusted. She worked a remote job and began to think more about practical matters, like the future and what she wanted to go in that vast, promising space: a house, kids. Marriage.

Eli was not on the same page. He kept up work as a bartender at a couple different places a few towns over; the comedy career had fizzled out before the move. When he came home, he'd often smell strongly of booze. He kept the top cabinet in their cramped kitchen full of liquor that was replenished with a frequency that made her uneasy. Some nights he didn't come home until the wee hours of the morning, and when he did, his tread on the stairs told her he definitely shouldn't have been driving. When she'd attempt to confront him about his drinking, he'd retreat into himself, brooding in a way that was so unlike him it felt like she was living with a stranger.

When her Abuela inevitably died, Ana felt like she was alone to deal with the grief. Eli didn't seem to be cognizant of her suffering, lost in his own dark stew. It was at the support group she attended one night in a church basement, simply called 'For Those Left Behind', that she met Mandy. The relief she felt sitting there holding cold styrofoam cups of coffee and chatting on the curb in the parking lot, under the sharp stars, was monumental. Finally, she’d thought, feeling like a woman who'd been stranded in the desert for the past year with no human connection, at last stumbling on water.

It was months after the fact that Ana found out Eli had been fired. He'd been spending his days at the casino instead, and the first time she looked at their joint account, she nearly had a stroke. The fight that night was one of the worst they'd had.

I just need a break, Ana said. I need space.

Eli, usually one to cave and press for peace, only looked at her, his chest heaving, dark circles under his eyes.

Fine, he said, and he left without another word, slamming the door on his way out.

It was after a week of forced silence, ignoring his texts and calls to her phone, that Ana knew she couldn't delay the inevitable anymore. Taking a drink from Eli's own store for fortitude, she dialed his number. We need to talk she said after the message tone, I know you're still up. Come over when you get this. She put the phone down, sat at the table, and waited to rip their faltering world in two.

He never came.

And when dawn tinged the sky the next morning, Ana Vasquez received a different kind of call.

.

Ana's been sitting at the base of the rusted slide for a while, lost in memory, before she realizes her cheeks are wet. She wipes her hands down her face and hears, at the same time, a rustling behind her. Standing up quickly, she spins around and sees nothing, only the woods, the dense undergrowth quivering in the space between two trees, as if someone has just stepped out of sight. The most absurd sense of knowing falls down over her shoulders.

"Eli?" she asks the woods. The woods, of course, do not answer. The branches have completely stilled. Ana lowers herself to the ground by the swings, replicating the position she'd been in as a child when they first met. This place, long abandoned by anyone's children, acts as a confessional and she speaks her thoughts aloud.

"I think you should know I was going to break up with you that night," she says. In the moment her words are swallowed by the air, she feels the shape of him before her, just out of sight, receiving them. The sensation is so strong it makes her skin prickle. Fantasma, her Abuela would have said. Ana doesn't believe in ghosts, not really, but she feels herself shiver. She pictures the car totaled, smashed around the tree, the cops handing her his belongings, the shock when she'd found, next to his keys, the small square box. The ring inside.

"You were going to propose to me, weren’t you? You were going to propose, but you must have known I'd say no. You had to, even you couldn't be that blind, Eli.

‘Sometimes I wonder what you felt like right before- if you had any last thoughts, if you even knew what was happening. I want you to know that it's not only your fault what happened between us. It's mine too."

Ana stops, working past a knot in her throat. This next thing, she doesn't know how to say.

"I was cheating on you," she says. "It was only emotional at first, but it turned into more. And we’re still together. I love her. I do. She asked me to marry her. And I want to. I want to say yes. I want to move on, like I was going to that night. But I need you to know I always loved you too. So much. I still love you. And I guess I just need you to tell me that it's okay... that you're at peace, that you'll be okay, because Eli- the guilt has been killing me. I want to live. And this- this isn't living."

Ana subsides into silence, feeling like a great beast has just shifted from her chest, and stares, through a haze of tears, at the woods, which shiver and move. Out of them steps a fox, its red-gold fur lit up by the sudden pooling of sunlight right where it stands watching her. It comes closer, one step and then two, and Ana gasps when she sees its eyes up close. Those hazel-green, bright orbs watch her with a tenderness and a knowing that doesn't belong to any animal.

"It's you," she whispers, as the fox comes to stand right before her and touches its nose lightly to her cheek; its rough tongue tickles as it licks the salt from her face, just once, tasting the gift of her tears.

.

Eli opens his eyes to the rough scrape of sand as the skiff touches shore once more. His cheeks are wet with salt water that is not from this nameless sea.

"Elias Donovan," a voice says, and he sits up, expecting to see the figures in white approaching again, but this time there is only one, making his uneven way across the sand. When he gets to Eli, he stops, lifting back his cowl, and Eli is thrown: the man's face is his own, looking back as from a mirror.

"Do you have your ticket?" his mirror image asks, and Eli, without thinking about it, reaches into his pocket. His fingers grasp something crumpled and small, and he pulls out a bandaid in paper wrapping. His lookalike smiles, and in the moment it takes Eli to blink, he is alone on the beach, staring at the vast impenetrable wall, same as always.

No. Not the same.

Now there is a door.