Alice Munros Best

– well, to make a mystery out of it. There’s a great temptation to believe in – You know.”
    “The soul?” I said, speaking lightly, feeling an appalling rush of love and recognition.
    “Oh, I guess you could call it that. You know, when I first came into this room there was a pile of papers here by the bed. Somebody had left them here – one of those tabloid sort of things I never looked at. I started reading them. I’ll read anything handy. There was a series running in them on personal experiences of people who had died, medically speaking – heart arrest, mostly – and had been brought back to life. It was what they remembered of the time when they were dead. Their experiences.”
    “Pleasant or un-?” I said.
    “Oh, pleasant. Oh, yes. They’d float up to the ceiling and look down on themselves and see the doctors working on them, on their bodies. Then float on further and recognize some people they knew who had died before them. Not see them exactly but sort of sense them. Sometimes there would be a humming and sometimes a sort of – what’s that light that there is or color around a person?”
    “Aura?”
    “Yes. But without the person. That’s about all they’d get time for; then they found themselves back in the body and feeling all the mortal pain and so on – brought back to life.”
    “Did it seem – convincing?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. It’s all in whether you want to believe that kind of thing or not. And if you are going to believe it, take it seriously, I figure you’ve got to take everything else seriously that they print in those papers.”
    “What else do they?”
    “Rubbish – cancer cures, baldness cures, bellyaching about the younger generation and the welfare bums. Tripe about movie stars.”
    “Oh, yes. I know.”
    “In my situation you have to keep a watch,” he said, “or you’ll start playing tricks on yourself.” Then he said, “There’s a few practical details we ought to get straight on,” and he told me about his will, the house, the cemetery plot. Everything was simple.
    “Do you want me to phone Peggy?” I said. Peggy is my sister. She is married to an astronomer and lives in Victoria.
    He thought about it. “I guess we ought to tell them,” he said finally. “But tell them not to get alarmed.”
    “All right.”
    “No, wait a minute. Sam is supposed to be going to a conference the end of this week, and Peggy was planning to go along with him. I don’t want them wondering about changing their plans.”
    “Where is the conference?”
    “Amsterdam,” he said proudly. He did take pride in Sam, and kept track of his books and articles. He would pick one up and say, “Look atthat, will you? And I can’t understand a word of it!” in a marvelling voice that managed nevertheless to have a trace of ridicule.
    “Professor Sam,” he would say. “And the three little Sams.” This is what he called his grandsons, who did resemble their father in braininess and in an almost endearing pushiness – an innocent energetic showing-off. They went to a private school that favored old-fashioned discipline and started calculus in Grade 5 . “And the dogs,” he might enumerate further, “who have been to obedience school. And Peggy …”
    But if I said, “Do you suppose she has been to obedience school too?” he would play the game no further. I imagine that when he was with Sam and Peggy he spoke of me in the same way – hinted at my flightiness just as he hinted at their stodginess, made mild jokes at my expense, did not quite conceal his amazement (or pretended not to conceal his amazement) that people paid money for things I had written. He had to do this so that he might never seem to brag, but he would put up the gates when the joking got too rough. And of course I found later, in the house, things of mine he had kept – a few magazines, clippings, things I had never bothered about.
    Now his thoughts travelled from Peggy’s family to mine. “Have you heard from Judith?” he said.
    “Not yet.”
    “Well, it’s pretty soon. Were they going to sleep in the van?”
    “Yes.”
    “I guess it’s safe enough, if they stop in the right places.”
    I knew he would have to say something more and I knew it would come as a joke.
    “I guess they put a board down the middle, like the pioneers?”
    I smiled but did not answer.
    “I take it you have no objections?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Well, I always believed that too. Keep out of your