Auracle

by Gina Rosati

  And then I head home to collect myself so I can break this bad news to Rei.

  CHAPTER 8

  Every religion has its own spin on life after death. The ancient Greeks had the elysian fields. Christians have heaven. Rei says the Buddhists believe souls are reincarnated until they reach a place of enlightenment called nirvana. Some people waste a lot of time worrying whether there’s something to look forward to when their bodies die besides eternal sleep.

  One thing I know for certain is that each of us possesses a sentient energy that can exist outside our physical bodies. I am living proof, but why should anyone take my word for it … even textbook physics says that energy cannot be destroyed.

  And the light that’s rumored to appear when someone dies? A few years ago, I saw a cylinder of light beaming down from the ceiling in a room I walked past at my great-grandmother’s nursing home. Twenty minutes later, the patient was on her way out in a body bag. It’s real. But where does the light go? Is there some amazing place for people who are really, really good? Do the nine circles of hell actually exist? Is that light your ride to the greatest party ever or does it just suck up your soul like a vacuum?

  Well, that I don’t know.

  I careen into my room and stop short.

  Something’s wrong.

  Something’s missing!

  It takes me a few seconds of stunned confusion to realize that my bed is empty. The something missing is me. I’m not there! I look on the floor, no. I look under the bed, no, no, NO!

  Pure, raw panic rolls over me like a tsunami.

  Where the hell am I?

  This is the feeling people must get when they’ve jumped out of a plane and realize they’ve forgotten to strap on their parachute; when a scuba diver is deep in the ocean and realizes she’s run out of oxygen; when you wake up and realize you’ve been buried alive!

  I can’t get back into my body if I can’t find it. The cord that normally tethers me seems to be drifting loose, shriveling up as I think. This must be why the tugs I felt back at the waterfall were so insistent: my inner alarm was going off and stupid me was too busy gawking at Taylor’s dead body.

  Stop, Anna. Calm down and think!

  I look around the room and realize the chair is no longer wedged under the doorknob. The music from my alarm clock still plays softly. Maybe my mom came home, couldn’t wake me up, and called an ambulance. But I felt the tug just minutes ago—there wasn’t enough time for that.

  Out in the living room, still sunk deep into the recliner, my father faces the television. He looks incapable of moving himself, much less someone else. I hear the toilet flush, and the sound of stumbling around before the bathroom door opens.

  And holy crap! There I am staggering from the bathroom, animated by some unknown force. What the hell? It’s my face, but the expression is something from out of a zombie movie, eyes wild, mouth drooling. Whatever is inside me grasps onto walls and doorjambs for leverage, making its way spasmodically back to my bedroom. It fumbles its way over to the desk and its knees try to bend several times before it finally lowers itself onto the desk chair. It seems completely unaware of me as it reaches for my pink magnifying mirror, clawing at it several times before the fingers actually close around it. When it sees my face reflected in the mirror, it lets out an inhuman moan. It’s my voice, but there’s something different. The tone is mine, but the inflection is different, but somehow familiar …

  That bitch!!!

  That’s Taylor in there!

  But how? Unless she saw me at the falls somehow. She probably died as soon as her head hit that first rock. If she separated from her body then, she could have seen me there, watching the action unfold in all my ethereal glory. But I should have seen her, too … if I had been paying attention to something other than watching her body wash downstream.

  I can figure that out later. What matters now is to get her the hell out of my body. I float up close and look hard into her eyes. Taylor, through my own dazed eyes, looks right through me. I reach out, tentatively, to slide my hand into my flesh hand.

  The reaction is immediate. Taylor yanks my flesh hand away, violently enough to lose her balance. The wobbly desk chair tips, pitching her headfirst against the edge of my desk. The crack! is audible, amplified through my own extreme senses. I am going to have one hell of a headache as soon as I get her out of there!

  All the sympathy I felt for Taylor at the falls evaporates as I rear back, ready to charge full force back into my body. Slam! It feels like I’m bouncing off a wall. Slam! A very solid brick wall. SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!

  This is getting me nowhere.

  She writhes on the floor, whimpering.

  I slam her again for good measure, but I bounce off like a racquetball in play. It’s too quiet for Taylor to notice, but I hear the front door close.

  “Helloooo,” Mom calls as she peeks into my room, only to find Taylor struggling on the floor like an overturned beetle. “Anna? Oh, my God, honey, what happened?”

  My mom dials 911 with shaky hands. There’s nothing wrong with Taylor that an Advil, a little time, and a whole lot of stretching won’t cure. The last thing my mom needs after two days at a real estate convention is to come home to all this drama. My father hasn’t moved except to reach for the remote and turn up the volume.

  I retreat to a corner of the room to wait for the ambulance and try to think over the sound of anxious motherisms.

  Why didn’t Taylor go into the light? I was so busy watching her body wash downstream, I wasn’t looking for a light. Did I miss it? Maybe the sun was too bright and I couldn’t see it. If she changes her mind, will the light come back for her?

  Or maybe she wasn’t invited. What if there was no light for her? What if the light doesn’t shine for people who steal cell phones and throw them into waterfalls? Where do those people go when they die if there’s no light?

  Obviously, she goes to my house to hijack my body.

  I have figured out there are a few different dimensions. There is the earthly dimension, right here where we all live. There’s an astral dimension, where I consider myself a traveler whenever I leave my body. And there’s probably at least one other dimension where the dead go by way of the light, but I’m not dead so I haven’t been there.

  When I leave my body on purpose and travel in this astral dimension, I remember what I see and do. Every now and then, I see other people floating around in this dimension, but most of them are not dead. It’s pretty common for people to slip out of their bodies while they dream. They don’t have a purpose; they aren’t rational. They meet up with other people having other dreams and everything blends together into chaos they will later remember as a very vivid dream, or they don’t remember it at all. I’ve had people at school tell me, “Oh my God, Anna, I had the weirdest dream last night and you were in it,” and I say, “Wow, that is weird.”

  Except I remember, too, and it wasn’t a dream.

  Every once in a while, though, I bump into a dead someone who is rational, but who decided not to go into the light. The dead have auras, too, just not as strong as the living. I don’t like to get into conversations with the dead. Especially if their color is off.

  * * *

  Taylor and my mom are at the hospital. They’ve run diagnostic tests, a CAT scan, and blood tests, but there are no tests to diagnose an extraneous soul possessing one’s body. The doctor concludes it’s a concussion, which is oushikuso, as Rei would say. Taylor is getting better control over my body. Her speech and movements are still slow, but more normal than they were earlier. She is sent home with my mom, some prescription painkillers, and instructions for my mom to wake her up every few hours.

  My mom followed the ambulance to the hospital in her own car, so she drives Taylor home. During the ride, I hover in the backseat, listening to my mom’s worried questions and Taylor’s evasive murmurs. My mom must think Taylor is foggy because of the concussion, but I wonder how she’ll manage later. How will she work around t
he obvious fact that she knows so little about me? I don’t think she even knows my last name. Does she expect she can just step right into my life and go from there? I try to picture myself in some of Taylor’s outfits and I almost laugh.

  Back at home, Mom sits on my bed, stroking my hair and making a huge fuss. Taylor still looks dazed through my eyes. She ignores my mom’s attention. She closes her eyes and wants to sleep. My mom covers her up with the blanket and it’s not long before I hear light snores. Since when do I snore?

  My mom looks so worried. If she even knew half of what’s going on, it would freak her out completely! She turns out the light and closes the bedroom door, leaving Taylor and me in relative darkness.

  I float over to the bed and watch the dark lump under the covers rise and fall. Now that she’s sleeping, maybe her guard is down and I can get past whatever barrier is keeping me out. I reach out with just one finger and tap gently on her cheek. She grimaces, but doesn’t wake up. I edge my way around her to the other side of the twin bed and sort of lie down, although I’m really floating about an inch off the mattress. I try to roll into her, but I’m met with a solid wall of flesh who grunts irritably.

  I lean very close to her ear. “Taylor Gleason.” I know she can’t hear me, but I say it anyway. “GO AWAY!”

  Snore.

  I spend the next half hour trying to inch, slide, push, and then force my way back into my own body, but my efforts are for nothing. She is stubbornly impermeable and I am tired. Not physically tired, but I feel like a car running on fumes. There’s something about being here in my house, close to my worried mom and my drunken father, that sucks my energy dry. And since I am one hundred percent energy, this is a problem.

  A sudden vibration startles me, until I realize it’s just my cell phone, still stuffed in the pocket of the jeans I’d traded earlier in favor of the gym shorts Taylor now sleeps in. I don’t have to look at the caller ID to know it’s Rei. He said he’d call me tonight, and I doubt anyone was home at his house when the ambulance came, so he probably thinks I’ve just forgotten to charge my phone. The guilt I feel when I think of him drains my spirits even lower.

  How can I tell him what’s happened this afternoon? Besides the obvious fact that he can’t hear me from this dimension, how do I tell him that not only did I ignore his advice, but I’m now trapped outside my body because of my own stubbornness?

  Even though I am floating here in my bedroom, I feel a terrible homesickness. What I want, what I need, is to be near Rei and all the calm that flows from him.

  I drift over by his bedroom window to find it wide open on this warm night. The smooth, sweet sound of acoustic guitar music pulls me closer. Could this be his surprise song? Rei plays by ear, listening to a little piece of a song on his iPod, and then working out the notes and chords on his guitar, playing them over and over until he has it memorized. Sometimes he’ll Google the lyrics and sing along, although despite his love for metal music, he realizes his voice is better suited for acoustic. Whatever song he’s teaching himself tonight is beautiful and complicated.

  I curl myself into a ball, hovering just inside his window, and the music soothes me like a cup of hot sweet tea on a snowy day. A light breeze blows through me, stirring the wind chimes into gentle motion. Rei is lost in his song. He sits cross-legged on the bed wearing a black T-shirt and gray gym shorts, his hair still wet from the shower.

  Slowly, I float down off the sill and linger over the swing chair hanging from the ceiling close to Rei’s bed, careful not to jar the chair into motion. From here, I can watch his fingers work the strings and chords, listen to his clear, quiet voice. The scent of his citrus soap floats all around him, along with a calm, summer sky blue aura.

  I hug my knees to my chest and bury my head in my arms so I will concentrate on the music instead of the complex strands of muscles flexing gently in his arms as he plays. Sitting here with Rei, I feel like a sponge soaking up the energy I badly need. When the music stops, I don’t move, I just let myself rest here and recharge. I don’t know how much time passes, but I suddenly realize that Rei isn’t moving. I peek up to see if he’s fallen asleep, and he’s not. He’s still sitting cross-legged; his guitar still rests on his lap, but his bewildered eyes look directly at me.

  “Anna?”

  CHAPTER 9

  My knee-jerk reaction is to bolt out of Rei’s room, so that’s just what I do. I hide myself in the tangle of willow branches and listen to him call my name softly, again and again. Finally, he says the one thing that breaks my resolve. “Are you okay?” he asks. “I tried to call you a couple of times and you never picked up.”

  I float back in through the open window and he relaxes when he sees me.

  “There you are,” he smiles at me as I hover around the swing chair.

  I’m surprised he can see me. Usually, I have to summon up a considerable amount of energy if I want to be seen. Maybe I absorbed enough of Rei’s energy tonight just by sitting with him that I materialized without meaning to.

  “Are you sleeping?”

  What does he mean by that? I must look confused because now he looks positively amused. “I thought so. So you won’t remember this conversation tomorrow.”

  Oh, really! I try not to show the surprise on my face. How does he know this? Have I shown up in his room before and had conversations with Rei that I don’t remember?

  I shrug a little. Since I have no voice in this dimension, this conversation will be very one-sided. That’s a small comfort.

  “Is your mom home?” he asks as he resumes his spot on the bed and picks up his guitar.

  I nod.

  “Did she have a good time?” He strums a few random chords, then adjusts one of the pegs a tiny bit. I wait until he looks up to nod.

  “Did you follow Seth and Taylor to the falls today?”

  I pause, not exactly sure how to answer this. It’s not like I can elaborate, so I nod. He just rolls his eyes.

  “I thought so. I tried Seth earlier, but he’s not answering his cell and I don’t think they even have a house phone anymore. Did she give his cell back to him?”

  Um, no. I shake my head, keeping my face as impassive as I possibly can.

  “That figures. He must be livid.”

  Why yes, he is. I nod.

  Rei strums one particular string over and over, adjusting the corresponding peg until he gets the sound he wants, then he strums all the strings together. All the lights but his desk lamp are off, and his eyes are half hidden under shadows and dark hair. “So I always wonder what you’re dreaming about on the nights you show up here,” he muses as the sound of the music fades, “but you can’t tell me now and I know you won’t remember the next day.”

  He looks up and smiles that slow, wide smile. “Or can you remember and you just don’t want to tell me?”

  I have never lied to Rei before tonight. I may not tell him certain truths that I know would lower his opinion of me, but unless the avoidance of a full disclosure is considered a lie, I haven’t deliberately deceived him. Plus, he has been keeping certain truths from me, too. Like the fact that I am one of those people who slips out of their body during a dream and goes gallivanting off to la-la land. And this annoys me almost as much as the fact that I have no freakin’ body!

  “Want to hear your surprise song? You won’t remember any of this, so it will still be a surprise when you hear it later.”

  It seems there are lots of surprises today. I am starting to realize just how little I know about this dimension, even after a dozen years of wandering in and out of it. How did Taylor get into me? Why can’t I get her out? How could Rei see me earlier and all those times he claims I’ve been here while I’m dreaming? Usually, I have to absorb a considerable amount of energy from around me in order to materialize in front of him. When he does see me, I know I appear solid to him, just as solid as when I’m in my body, but I can’t ever remember anyone else seeing me when I’m out here.

  When the song is fi
nished, Rei looks up at me, and I smile and silently clap my hands. I love everything he plays on his acoustic guitar, and he knows this. He smiles a sleepy smile, so I know it’s time to leave. I wave and point to the window.

  “Okay, I’ll see you in the morning,” he whispers as he parks his guitar on the stand beside his bed. “Sweet dreams.”

  For one crazy moment, I want to tell him what’s happened, that Taylor’s dead body is stuck on a branch downstream, that Seth will probably be blamed for her death, that I can’t dream because I can’t sleep because I’m locked out of my body because Taylor has stolen it. And then I imagine the look that will be on his face, because he’ll think this is his fault, and if he had skipped his aikido class, he could have prevented this entire fiasco. I have to get my body back before he finds out what’s happened.

  I spend the night hovering over my bed while Taylor snores, hoping she’ll pop out of my body during a dream so I can get back in. Sometime around one o’clock and then again at four, my mom comes in and shakes Taylor’s shoulder, just like the doctor told her to. Taylor wakes up enough to grouch at her, and then my mom leaves us both in the dark again.

  I wonder if Rei considered the danger of someone taking possession of my body if I wasn’t in it. I never really thought of it before, but it makes sense. If there’s an empty shell left lying on the beach, won’t a hermit crab move into it? I’ve encountered spirits in this dimension who are obviously dead and wandering, but I’ve always shied away from talking to them. Maybe my subconscious was smart enough to realize if a dead soul had known I’d left a perfectly good living body lying around unguarded, it would just be an invitation for trouble.

  * * *

  Watching Taylor sleep is like waiting for a pot of water to boil. I need a better plan of action here, and since planning has never been my strength, I consider how Rei would deal with this.

  One of Rei’s favorite quotes is from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” It’s a principle of aikido, too, to get inside your enemy’s mind and find out what makes them tick.