The Many Afterlives of John Robert Thompson

by Valerie Lioudis

  He awoke to the feeling of being put back down. He felt cold and alone. The whimpers came out without him trying. He missed the girl already and she was only feet from him. It felt like someone had chopped off an extension of himself. Though melodramatic, he felt like he would die right then and there without her. Her mother looked down at this distraught puppy and sighed. She knew it too, that he was theirs.

  But she had a way she was planning on doing this, and neither John nor the girl would know the truth for a day or two. You see, three days later was the little girl’s birthday and her mother intended on surprising her with a new puppy. As they walked out the door, John felt all hope drain from his heart. He lay in a puddle of fur for the next two days until, like a prayer being answered, the mother came back through the doors and scooped him up to bring him to his forever home.

  And this, my friends, is why dogs are so loyal. Deep down inside somewhere, hidden like a shadow, they are the same as us, minus all the nonsense and bitterness. Minus all the things that make humans terrible people. They are our humanity at its best points. They are the soul searching for home and when they find it they will protect it with their life because it is the only thing that matters.

  Energy

  The one time of year that John went out of his way to draw attention to his little apartment was Christmas. He had an overflowing box of outdoor decorations that he had accumulated over the last few decades. The blessing of never having moved gave him the opportunity to add to his collection in such a way that each piece had its own perfect home. Each string of lights and bow had a special spot that it lived in for the entire month of December.

  John had added some larger pieces over the last few years. Inflatables were anchored down on the garage apartment roof. His landlords actually loved the amount of effort John put into his holiday display. They were Christmas people, too. It was the common bond that made him feel less like a tenant and more like family. Even with his new projectors and blow up characters, John’s favorite decoration would always be his grandfather’s string lights.

  Large and bright, the old fashioned c7 ceramic bulbs shone like beacons every year. Blue, orange, red, white and green painted bulbs would line every part of the roof. When he finished with the outdoor lights, he would head inside to start decking the halls and trimming the tree. This year, though, John never made it that far. He was heading up for his last trip to the roof when his foot hooked into one of the ladder rungs and got stuck. As he fell back, he was unable to fall completely free of the ladder onto his back. Instead, his head took the brunt of the force.

  John was killed instantly. His landlord had been joyfully watching John officially kick off the holiday season while sipping a warm cup of cocoa when she saw him take the fall. Christmas was never going to be the same for her because that image was now burned into her memory forever. This was the one time of year she got to see real joy on her friend’s face and now that joy would be replaced with his last living sound, a scream of terror. For years, she would relive that moment whenever she would see the first decorations of the season, praying that it was enough that his last moments were spent doing something he truly loved.

  Energy burst out of John’s skull as it cracked into the pavement. His soul spilled out of his body like an egg free of its shell. Gathering himself together, he tried to wiggle his toes only to realize they no longer existed. Well, they technically existed, right there in front of him. They were attached to the very limp, mostly bloody body that he had once had full use of. Now, he was somehow on the outside and was immediately being drawn away from his former host.

  The pull of the universe was too great to fight. It was the strongest magnetism that you will ever feel. John, ever the follower, just went with the flow. Hues that he had never seen before shone off his surroundings. Bright yellows flowed off every tree, flower, and blade of grass. A purple streak ran by and John was surprised that underneath all of that majestic color was a fidgety little squirrel. The dog chasing behind him was a blue wave. The world looked so much more alive than when he was looking at it through his human eyes.

  Swirling around, he tried to get a glimpse of his own color. It was an impossible task, like a dog chasing his own tail, he spun around and around. The force was pulling him closer to the town center. People were buzzing around in their daily activities, almost unrecognizable in their fields of energy. No two colors were the same, all had shades and notes of their own. John breezed past the old oak tree that stood proudly in the town square and the tree’s yellow force reached out towards him. As it got closer, he could feel something draw him to the old oak. The edges of their combined colors blended and exploded in a burst of white hot light. Energized, John stopped following and began searching out other energy sources to touch. Dipping down, he poked and prodded at every person he could find. They all carried their own sensations. The tree was pure energy, but humans were a mix of energy and experiences. John could feel a lifetime’s worth of emotions in each split-second interaction.

  Cranberry light flowed from a woman huddled on the side of a building smoking a cigarette on what John guessed was her escape from work. Red hot anger flowed into John’s field. Her power was so intense that it took over his trajectory and tried to engulf him. Heat and passion flowed through John, while his temperance rushed back at her. John was a calming wind and the more his energy mixed with hers, the less angry the woman was, causing her pull over him to become less intense.

  With one last determined effort, John was able to slingshot out of the woman and back into the open air. Fearful of being absorbed by another person and being unable to get back out, John allowed the stream of energy to whisk him away. John thought happily back to a time in his childhood when he had visited a waterpark. His mother had allowed him to spend the afternoon drifting in the lazy river. The energy stream John found himself in was a cosmic version of that. Beautiful scenery was abundant around John and the others that they eventually picked up. It was as though the stream was one large soul transit system.

  You weren’t able to hear the thoughts of the other recently released energies, but you could feel their essence. Like droplets of water, they began to clump together with those that were similar to themselves, amplifying their presence. John felt less like an individual and more like a collective of calm. Soon, joy began to overwhelm his area. A spark of hate was pulled in, but the collective diluted it and then changed it to match the good within the group.

  Did they disappear? The passing thought echoed through the group as a feeling. His anxiety was quickly washed away by the others feelings of acceptance and love. Another wave rushed over them as they collided with an even bigger group. Excitement buzzed through the group like electricity. Suddenly, what was like a lazy river felt like a trampoline. With each bounce, they were pulled further out of the atmosphere. Each high led John to wish he would never fall back down again. The stream led them up to the most barren part of Earth.

  When they reached the North Pole, there was no longer any life to attract the energy down. With one last bounce, they were grabbed by the enormous current of the source of all of Earth’s energy. Just as energy flows from the sun down to the Earth to feed life with its warm glow, when life ends, the energy is pulled back to its source to feed the miracle that feeds us all. Immediately, those in the stream could feel the shift from what they once felt to whatever the sun was. For that short span, moving the enormous distance from planet to star, they were one with everything.

  John for the briefest of seconds felt like everything and everyone who had come before him. He was overcome with every emotion from terror to elation. For the Sun feeds us with its warmth and light, but we recharge it with what we do. Our essence, who we are deep in our core, sets the fires alight, bursting for the chance to go back for another trip. When we are divided, we are small and insignificant, but returning to our roots together, we set the world aflame.

  Hi. My Name
is John.

  Each evening brought the same routine. John would watch TV after work with his dinner warmed up in the microwave. TV dinners were convenient and cheap. If he was looking for a home cooked meal, he would have to head down to his mother’s house. Stirring the runny mashed potatoes, John looked around the bare room. The walls were painted the same dingy off-white that was there when he moved in. The outlines of the previous tenants’ pictures still glared at him from the walls.

  A more motivated man would have dealt with the signs of the previous occupants. In other homes, you could see the owner’s personality in their furnishings. Some people were fancy and neat, while others were eclectic and messy. To the trained eye, John’s personality was expressed in the lack of personalization. He was unmotivated, and rarely became enthusiastic enough about anything to give it more than a passing glance.

  “Hmmmmm,” he sighed, wondering for the first time in his life if he was missing something.

  Dishes were washed immediately, which wasn’t really a chore since it always consisted of utensils and nothing more. The kitchen was as bare as the living room. ‘Passing traveler chic’ is what his mother called it, which was funny because John had never travelled a day in his life. Steam fogged the mirror before John would step in to rinse away the day. He would don the same flannel pajamas every evening, never really seeing the point in owning more. Clicking the alarm to the ‘On’ position, he smiled as he looked at the only piece of decoration in his lifeless apartment.

  While other had countless trophies from the endless activities they participated in during their youth, John was not awarded numerous accolades. Actually, he was only handed one award in his entire life. Second Place Science Fair 1983 was carved into a brass plate and adhered to a geode. Beautiful crystals flicked light around his surroundings. John wasn’t a prideful man, but the sight of that rock always warmed his soul. Only first place moved on to the state championship, but John’s project on hypothetical underwater biodomes had earned him recognition for the first and last time.

  Fleece sheets wrapped John in a cocoon of comfort. The same as every night, he closed his eyes and counted slowly backwards from 100, never once reaching 1 before slumber would overtake him. Unlike every night prior to this one, John would not sleep for his standard seven hours before waking peacefully from a dreamless night. On this particular night, an earthquake would hit John’s town at exactly 2:17 AM and, though the damage would be minimal overall for his zip code, John would be listed as the single fatality that the earthquake would cause. You see, the shaking caused that one prized possession of John’s to fall on his sleeping head, knocking him square in the temple. And that was all she wrote.

  Confusion overwhelmed John as he tried to remember when he walked into the crowded room of individuals all seated in rows of chairs. He couldn’t for the life of him remember joining a group that held meetings, yet there he was seated five rows back from the front in between a ridiculously large and heavily made up older woman and an extremely prim and proper middle-aged business woman.

  “Excuse me,” John tried to say to the business woman, but she shushed him before he could finish. “Where are we?” He questioned the woman on his other side.

  Her sausage like fingers pointed towards the front of the room. A voice from the front row came into focus, much like your vision clears when you first open your eyes in the morning. “I probably wouldn’t want to do it all over again,” the man’s voice spoke emphasizing the word all, “but it would be fun to take a turn or two around a few of my days. Especially if I could leave the bad ones behind like they never happened. There is a saying ‘you’ve got to take the bad with the good’ and if that is the case, I am glad to be here listening to all of you, hearing all your secrets. Well, maybe not all of them. Right, Margaret?”

  The room erupted in a booming laugh at a joke that John didn’t quite get. “All in all, I think I had a good life. I missed out on a few things I wish I could have done, and I did a few things that I wish I had not. But, hey, which one of us hasn’t?”

  “That feels like my time. For all you newcomers out there, sit back, open your ears and enjoy the stories. You are about to get to know the real meaning of life. When you get it, and I mean truly get it, you will know it is time to talk. Don’t rush it. I spoke three times before this, sure that I had it all figured out. I hadn’t, at least not yet. This time, I am sure. I have to head on to the next place. Keep working, it works if you work it.”

  Warm air flooded the room. “Hey short stuff,” the oversized woman to his left said. “Sorry we couldn’t introduce ourselves when you got here, but we stay quiet when someone is speaking. Name’s Iris, and that’s Dotty on your other side. Welcome to the 12th step.

  “What in the world is the 12th step? Are we in…”

  “No, not as far as we know,” she cut him off.

  “Good.” John had secretly feared he would end up in Hell when he was alive. “Wait, does this mean that I’m dead?” he questioned falling back into his chair.

  “Sorry to say it, but yup, we all are.”

  That revelation made John’s head hurt, and not from where he was knocked dead by a geode. 45 years and it was over in an instant. He felt as if he never had the chance to get his sea legs when it came to life. Now there would never be a chance to finally get some motivation. Dotty had headed off to get a cup of coffee. Iris pulled him back out of his self-pity by laying her delicate hand on his.

  “I know this is a lot to take in, but if you sit back and listen you have a chance to learn the lessons that others managed to weed out of their lives. Work at it like a puzzle. You just need to snap the pieces in place and it will all make sense. At least that was what they told me when I got here.”

  Her confidence in herself was evident by her direct and deliberate eye contact, something she must have honed with years of practice in whatever career required the attire she wore now. “Dotty and I have been here for a while. Not nearly as long as some, but not as new as you. We got here together. Dotty was making some extra cash driving people around for one of those apps, and I was out of town on business. Mid ride we were t-boned by a semi, and poof, mid conversation we were suddenly sitting here.”

  “Yeah,” Dotty shook her head as she sat slowly next to her afterlife friend. “We would have been just strangers passing for a moment in time, but that all changed in an instant.”

  John was about to ask some more questions when the room fell silent. Deep and raspy, a voice floated above their heads. “Hi, my name is Ed, and I was alive.”

  “Hi, Ed!” The room called back in unison.

  A smile peeked out of the older gentleman’s face. “Hi,” he answered in return. “I have been here a long time, but this is my first time trying to move on. I guess this is exactly the way I was in life, always so careful. I always tried to see if anyone else had been through it before, that way I could predict the outcome. I lived 89 solid years with the predictable actions of an engineer. My life was a series robotic motions. You go to college, so I did that. You get married, so I did that. You have kids, so I did that. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it all, but my motivations were not my own.”

  Heads were bobbing in agreement around the room. John felt more alone than he had in life. All of these other people lived, maybe not for their own reasons, but they still got out there and made something of themselves. What had he done? It was going to be a long transition for him if finding the answer to that question was his way out.

  “Years passed too quickly, and I never bothered to ask myself if I really wanted any of it. I was too busy following the formula to clear a path uniquely my own. I forged a life, but it was someone else’s blueprint. Even my career consisted of building other men’s visions. I never took a risk, and left a mark that would be forever remembered as mine. My three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren are out there now, and I wish I could shou
t down to them to stomp on the earth. Leave a footprint so big that the whole universe knows you were there.”

  “They keep saying you will know when it is time, and I was hoping getting up here would be enough to push me through, but I was wrong. I calculated it again, and that is my lesson. So, now I have to figure out how to be spontaneous enough to earn my way out of this chair.”

  Ed sat back down, and the room was quiet once again. A woman in her twenties stood and prattled on about nonsense for what felt like an eternity. John was sure she missed the entire point of both this exercise and her life completely due to her innate narcissism. Hopefully, there was a grading curve for those too young to have shed all of that nonsense. Dotty took a shot at it, and quickly sat back down. In between speakers she confided that she should have organized her thoughts better before taking the chance.

  “It is a surreal feeling. You are speaking, but the audience isn’t just the other people in the room. I felt like I had a direct line to God, or whoever is calling the shots. I was all ready to start rattling off what I thought was wisdom but felt sorely inadequate as soon as I opened my mouth,” Dotty explained.

  That was what compelled him. He knew exactly what he had to say. There would be no embellishments, no false wisdom, and no advice. It would just be the God’s honest truth. John’s God honest truth. As soon as the words left his mouth, the door opened and the sun shone brightly down on him. A warm wind led him on to the next phase of his existence.

  “Hi, my name is John and I was alive, but I never lived.”

  Being Scored

  Seasons changes and years pass, and, for most, that time is filled with events and changes equal to the seasonal change. For John, however, it was just one day after another, and so on forever and ever. Well, not forever because John was human just like the rest of us, therefore his time was limited even if he refused to treat it as though it was. Spring bulbs were bursting through the cold soil to the surface to drink in the warm light of the sun. John, unlike those industrious bulbs, was holed up in his apartment sitting on his ass literally doing nothing.