Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (and a Hole in its Head)

Chapter 28

Thinking about the nature of love...

Caleb was excited or anxious to talk to Ben. But neither fit, exactly. It was somewhere in between—but the same kind of feeling. He was antsy. He had something to say, and he just wanted to get it over with. He went over it in his head, again and again. But the person he needed to talk to wasn't available. Ben was in a bag on the floor. Just—not there.

And it was like, well—Caleb hadn't really dealt with loss in his life, loss like losing a loved one. He'd never felt that kind of need to speak to someone who'd passed on. But he imagined it, looking at Ben's bones. He imagined that, well, it'd be a real leap of faith to think they might be able to understand me. That the air from my lungs might transcend whatever all this is—life, death, the universe. Even though he was gathering evidence that Ben was there. That he hadn't made him up. That something that was essentially Ben had continued on past death. He was pretty sure, at least. But only at night? It was a lot to unravel. And evidence that couldn't be bounced off of anyone else. Evidence that was too personal, too unreliable.

And a sort of meditation on the nature of death occupied his thoughts through a lengthy bath and a lay-down in his fluffy robe on his gorgeous foam mattress. A meditation, also, on what he had to say. Ben's words from last night replaying in his head, and a sort of rebuttal being written alongside them.

It wasn't about Ben, he thought. It wasn't about him at all. He hadn't transcended death for some selfish reason. He wasn't there to haunt or to get retribution or solve some essential mystery of his own existence. He was there for Molly, Caleb thought. He was there to heal, in whatever capacity he could—he was there to prove to her that he hadn't killed himself. He was there to get some kind of justice not for his own sake—what would the dead care—but for Molly's sake. To fill a hole in her heart she'd tried filling with alcohol, last night. Ben was sure of it—and he wanted to make Ben sure of it. To re-energize him. To make him feel not all was lost. The wheels were in motion. There would be a resolution to all this. He was confident in it. Maybe he was confident in it because he didn't feel he had a choice—maybe he never had a choice—but he was confident.

He'd been thinking about love. He'd been thinking—well, he knew, he was falling in love with Molly. So soon? Yes—almost as soon as he'd read the story on the local weekly's website. Almost as soon as he'd seen selfies on her Instagram, carefully curated, maybe, to cause this kind of emotion. But love, he thought—it wasn't just some lust or fleshy thing. It wasn't just chemicals. But it also wasn't something that transcended, that was tied to some soul, as we conceive it. It didn't live on past death.

Love, he thought—it couldn't live on past death, because it was, essentially, life. It was a raw and visceral thing that animated us—that maybe pulled the strings of Ben's marionette. That animated his bones in stop-motion. That animated all of our bones. It was something that drove us to live and to keep living. It was, essentially, what was so confusing about existence—it was the great contradiction at the center of all of it. Of the tension between life and death, between fate and free will. It was selfish and selfless. You had no choice in it, maybe, but it was expressed in every choice you made.

Did Caleb contradict himself? Maybe he contradicted himself. Maybe he'd reached the age where he could simply resolve the great contradictions and no longer think about them. But he'd come to a decision. He'd come to a realization—a breakthrough, in the case. Sort of. There was no soul, in the way we conceived it. There were no soul mates—no people tied to each other in some way that transcended life, that went beyond, that extended forever into the unknown. Love was infinite and finite. Love was, at its core, the commitment and the actions and the momentum of it all. The momentum of making the same selfish and selfless choices on behalf of yourself and another—of expanding life from one being to another, of creating new life.