In another room

In his remarkable story "The Lives of the Dead," Tim O'Brien dreams the girl he loved back to life. She was nine when she died of a brain tumor, a fourth grader just as he was, and decades later he still conjures her back.

What's it like being dead, he asks her on one of their visits. She answers -- "I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading... An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading."

I conjure my own dead back, too. I suppose we all do. My father is alive in another room. He's reading his books and smoking his cigarettes and he looks at the world with the same tired eyes I knew when I was little.

For me the dead live not in books but in other rooms, in a house that goes on forever. Where you can wander from room to room and never find them and never retrace your steps. The characters I write live in these rooms, too. Freda is there and little Teddy, Etta and Josef and Max and Georg, and when I finish their stories they live on without me.

None of this makes sense. My father is buried in Colorado and my characters exist only in my imagination. But maybe imagination and memory are just different forms of the same human impulse. Maybe they're different forms of love.