V. Lioudis
The Many Afterlives of John Robert Thompson
Copyright © 2017 by Valerie Lioudis
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
To Taylor, my first born, and reason that this book came to be. I love you, for everything you are, and thank you for pushing me to pursue my dreams.
To Jack, thank you for your endless hours fixing my mess, and believing that the stories were worth reading. You will never know how much your support has meant to me.
And last, but certainly not least, to Preston Leigh. Thank you for everything you do for authors, including running a contest on the leighgendarium.com that included prizes from Molly Phipps, who made this beautiful cover, Ben J. Adams, who drew three amazing sketches featured inside, and Kevin G. Summers, who formatted this body of work. Thanks to you, and to them, also.
Introduction
John Robert Thompson had all the makings of becoming a spectacular man. He was gifted with every tool you would need to be charismatic, intelligent, ambitious and engineering. The problem with John Robert Thompson was that he was none of those things. He was the world’s most mediocre man. Unable to find his real footing in life, he failed to truly accomplish anything.
This should have been disconcerting at the age of 45, but it was not. There was a bigger problem. John Robert Thompson never wanted anything more than the necessities of life. Without wants there is no drive and without drive there is no ambition. You need ambition to fuel the fires of creativity and ingenuity. Those fires never burned in his soul. Not even the tiniest spark existed.
His mother would plead with him from an early age to go out into the world and make his mark on it. “Life is there for living, John,” she would beg. But no amount of coaxing could get John up off the couch and out into the world. He did as he was told, nothing less and nothing more. He didn’t even have enough energy to fight away the tasks he really had no interest in doing.
So, off to school he went each day, toiling and churning, but never achieving more than an average grade throughout his whole scholastic career. When graduation day finally came, his mother had long given up on her dream of her beautiful baby boy heading off to college to become a doctor or lawyer. Instead, John opted to wait out the next few years living at home and working in a job he neither loved nor hated.
Finally, his mother, fed up with his inability to see any reason to try to grow and achieve something, sent him off to live on his own. He did just that, but in the most unceremonious way ever. Three blocks down from his mother’s home was a room for rent above a couple’s garage. That one room apartment would become John Robert Thompson’s home for the next 23 years.
The room was furnished in hand-me-downs when he moved in, and he never saw any reason to change that. The TV was the only thing in the room that was ever upgraded. But as was with everything in John’s life, that wasn’t due to a passion for watching shows, but because the old rabbit ears no longer caught a signal. He was forced to move along with the rest of us and purchase one that could accept cable.
The job John had when he graduated high school was the same one he was at when his 45th birthday came. Even with well over two decades of experience working with the same company, John had managed to be passed over every time there was a promotion available to him. His managers that had come and gone had all said the same thing, “John, you lack the passion needed to lead those below you. If you want to move up in this company then you have to show an interest, not just take up space.”
He wasn’t a happy man, but he wasn’t unhappy either. The best way to describe his temperament would be to say that he is a lukewarm glass of water, all the time. Though, to be fair to John, it would take venturing out into the world for things to happen that would allow you to have opinions and strong feelings about things. He did his best to avoid all of that nonsense.
Being smarter than most, John avoided the news of any kind. He had no interest in what was going on in the world. All he really needed to be concerned about was what was happening in his immediate vicinity. Who cares about what the people two towns over are doing, let alone those miles across an ocean. If they weren’t going to directly affect John’s life, he didn’t have the time for it.
It was a magical dance that John managed to do. No one at any other time throughout our existence, past or future, had the ability to avoid life like John Robert Thompson. It took real skill for a man to be alive for 45 years and have never made a lasting impression on anyone or anything around him. He was the most forgettable human being of all time. He had every opportunity to do something, anything, to show he was once here. Then one day, he didn’t. Instead, he died.
Table Of Contents
Introduction
Heaven
Reincarnation
Hell
Movie Screening
The Bridge
The Survey
Ghost
Guardian Angels
Three Apologies
What did you learn?
Highway to Hell
It is a Dog’s Life
Energy
Hi. My Name is John.
Being Scored
Interplanetary Pick up
Trial and Error
Quite the Amusement
The Revolving Door
God
The Epic Battle
The End
About the Author
Connect with Valerie
Heaven
It came out of nowhere and hit him like a truck. That may have been because it was an actual truck. John had made the tiniest mistake of not looking both ways twice before stepping off the curb. The delivery driver had made the not-so-small mistake of texting while he should have been paying attention to the road. These two mistakes, one not-so-small and one very small indeed, landed John at The Gateway to Heaventm.
Well, that isn’t entirely true. John landed some 50 feet away from where the truck hit him, but his spirit landed at The Gateway to Heaventm. Everything was ridiculously white at The Gateway. Even without having literal eyeballs, you would have had to take a second or two to adjust to the blinding starkness that surrounded you. What should have been comforting was actually kind of unnerving. John stood still as could be, just waiting for someone to tell him what to do. That was John for you. Even in the afterlife, he had no ambition.
“John Robert Thompson,” a woman wearing an all-white pantsuit called from across the room. “It is very nice to meet you. You need to follow me to orientation. But first I must ask, do you have any questions?”
John took a second to ponder her question, then shrugged. He figured whatever he needed to know they would end up telling him anyway, so what was the point wasting anyone’s time with unnecessary questions. She seemed confused for a second at his lack of curiosity but didn’t miss a beat. She turned with purpose and headed briskly down the overly white hallway.
“Try to keep up then, we don’t want yo
u missing anything that the welcoming committee has to say. My name is Melody and I am a greeting angel here at The Gateway to Heaventm. This is your one stop staging area where we prep you for the trip over to Heaven Incorporated. Everything is perfect over there, and we don’t want to send anyone over unprepared for the eternity we have planned for them. You will be happy to know that you have been selected along with many other human beings to head off to the happiest, most fulfilling place in existence.”
“Turn in here, John,” she politely said as she gestured into a room. “They are just waiting for the last few members of your group to arrive. You can mingle with the other souls waiting with you.” With that she headed off down the hallway, sighing as she went. It really did bother her that he didn’t seem very interested in her spiel. That had never happened to her before.
The room held around 100 chairs, all of them facing toward a stage. Everything was all still very white and stark. There was not a speck of dust nor a thing out of place. John noticed that souls looked a lot like people, but with a slight glow about them. Most of the chairs were filled with men and women of all ages. Each one gave off a soft shimmer. No two colors were the same, and you could almost feel the glows if you got too close to them. John made that mistake only once, and did his best to observe a bubble of personal space after that encounter.
The others seemed to love the sensation, as they were going out of their way to brush up against one another. The colors would dance and flicker, sometimes bouncing off each other and other times melding together into a new, different glow. John gazed around the room, scanning for a chair that was farthest away from the other people. Once he found it, he made a beeline to get there. All of this interacting was exhausting.
The smell of cookies smacked him in the face so hard he almost fell over. Turning his head in the direction of the aroma he saw an older woman with mocha colored skin and a glow of pure gold. “Sweetheart, are you ok? You look rather queasy,” she asked John.
“I’m fine,” he mumbled, determined to get to that chair before anyone else could stake a claim on it.
Roses, followed by seawater, oranges, and honey. Smells were coming off all of the other souls in the room. Just like the colors, no two were alike. John wondered as he sat down what he must smell like. His grandfather had smelled of old leather chair and cigars. He hoped that would be his scent. It dawned on him that he never checked to see what color his glow was as he scurried across the room.
Reaching out his hands, he looked down and saw nothing different. They looked as they always did, maybe it was something only the others saw on you. He thought about asking one of the women that were gathered nearby chatting noisily, but thought the better of it. He was sure they would answer all of those questions later.
Each moment that passed there was another soul entering the room guided by angels dressed in business attire of all white. When the last chair had an occupant, the door shut and the lights dimmed. A large screen rose out of the stage area and a 30 second video played showing pictures of people in the room smiling and laughing. John recognized some of the faces as those of people he had seen as he crossed the room. There were many faces shown in the video, but not John’s.
Two of the most beautiful people he had ever seen entered the stage, one from each side. The man was tall and muscular with dark hair and the brightest blue eyes. The woman was small and toned, with light hair that fell all the way to her waist. They entered with an energy that brought the room to their feet. Motivational speakers on earth pray for the kind of charisma that these two beings had. The souls leapt and danced in jubilation, and although John could feel the buzz of energy, it didn’t affect him with the same fervor. He stood with the crowd, but only because he was a follower at heart.
“Welcome to The Gateway to Heaventm, you beautiful, magnificent, wondrous beings! We are overjoyed to finally meet you and put you on your way to becoming a member of Heaven Inc.! That angelic being over there is Inspiration, and I am Tenacity. We are here to transition you from your earth-bound lives to your future eternity in the happiest place in existence.”
With that the entire room erupted in cries of joy. All except one man. That man stood there like a stone, hoping Heaven would be a less noisy. Inspiration and Tenacity took turns pumping up the crowd with buzz words and slogans. The longer they talked, the more the room glowed. It was as if their words were feeding the souls radiance. When it finally hit a crescendo, you couldn’t see anymore. The souls’ glows had combined to be as white as everything in the room around them. In a moment, it was burning white, then there was a flash and a pop.
With that, everyone was gone. Well, everyone but John. The room that had been filled with joyous laughing and singing was suddenly silent. John looked around and felt content for the first time since this hectic day had started. He slumped back into his chair and closed his eyes. A small rest wasn’t going to hurt anything.
Melody peeked her head in the door and sighed. This had never happened before at The Gateway to Heaventm in all the years she had been there. Souls go to Heaven Inc. That was the way around here. It was a good thing her supervisor was still there for the day. There was never anything mentioned in her training about souls not glowing, having no smell, and refusing to leave the orientation.
Reincarnation
Eating alone has its hazards, like not chewing enough and suddenly gasping for air. Maybe if John had clicked that link online that taught you how to give yourself the Heimlich he could have kept on being mediocre. But we all know John wasn’t about to plan ahead, opting to take a nap instead. So there he was, stiff as a board on the floor with a half chewed piece of cheese steak lodged in his throat. God knows how long it would take for someone to find him. Probably a week or so, after not showing up for a couple of shifts and his supervisor finally getting mad enough to try calling.
The thing is, John won’t really be there anymore. Just a smelly shell of who the man used to be. The John that once filled that shell of a man will be far away in the office of a life evaluator. She will be busy looking over his file. Her frustration at how thin it is will show on her face. John will be calm as usual, unaware that this may really be a problem. His knack for not giving a damn has kept him out of sticky situations during his life, but this time it is the cause of one.
“Mr. Thompson. Do you realize you were alive for 45 full years and were unable to accomplish anything of importance?”
John thought for a moment about what the irritated woman was asking, but he became distracted by the plainness of the room he was in. It turns out your fate is determined in a 1980’s work sitcom office. Very brown and very drab. A motivational poster of a monkey was pinned behind the woman’s back. “Work Harder, We Can Always Get Monkeys To Do Your Jobs.” That should have been John’s first clue as to how this meeting would go, but he was more interested in the monkey’s tie than the words.
He shrugged.
She inhaled deeply and rubbed her brow. “John, let me be straight with you. You are what we call a hard case. Unusually hard, if I’m being honest with you. I am looking at this file about your life, and it’s painfully boring. Do you understand why you were put on Earth, John?”
He shrugged.
Her thumbs rose to her eyes and she rubbed them in the tiniest circles, hoping this would help her find the words needed to express the seriousness of the situation.
“Mr. Thompson, you are given life to live it. To reach out and grab it by the throat. You are meant to be amazing, to make waves. Life is imperfect, beautiful chaos that should be a thrill ride from start to finish. You were there to love and be loved, to create and inspire, to dream and then chase those dreams down like they’re air and you’re suffocating without them... Sorry. Sorry. I forgot how you passed. Anyway, John, life is an adventure. Did you ever have an adventure?”
He shrugged.
With that she growled, “John, I can’t h
elp you if you can’t even answer my questions. What you don’t seem to understand is that you have been sent back to live 180 times. 180 times, John. That’s way more than any other human being that has ever lived. You, as a human, are sent to Earth to live and 180 times in a row you have failed to do so. This is the longest you were down there as one person and you still couldn’t manage to do anything of any importance at all. We don’t know what to do John. We are at a loss here as to how to help you. We need you to help yourself, John. Don’t you want to move on? None of us want to send you back just to have you end up here again still unable to take a risk and live a little. What are you afraid of, John?”
John wished he could answer the woman so she would stop looking at him that way, but he had no answer. He knew he probably shouldn’t, but he shrugged again.
“Fine, John. You will go back. You will start again and if there is a God in Heaven, we will meet again in a few decades with a much thicker file sitting on my desk. I will finally get that promotion my boss promised me after your 50th go at it, we’ll all have a good laugh, and I will send you to the next stage. Won’t that be great, John? But know this, I am not taking any chances this time. It isn’t going to be an easy ride for you. Maybe if I send you somewhere where you will have to struggle and suffer that may get you off your well rested butt. So get ready John because you are in for a wild ride.”
Before he was able to shrug again, she poofed him out of her sight and into a tiny clump of cells which were busy at work splitting apart and forming ears, legs, and so on.
Dave, the jerk from down the hall, popped his head into her office. “Tell me that wasn’t him again,” he questioned, already knowing the answer. “How many times is it now?”
“181,” she replied flatly. “50 bucks says he goes for 182.”
Hell
One in 1,600,000. Those are the odds of being killed by a meteor. So, if you think about it that way, dying was the most remarkable thing that John Robert Thompson managed to do in his 45 years on this planet. He would be on the news, in papers, and on the timelines of everyone’s preferred social media. John Robert Thompson would be famous for 15 minutes until something else happened that took the attention of an easily distracted society.
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