by Fynn Perry
"No need to ask if you’re new, not with that landing!” the glowing image of the old man said with a chuckle and a knowing look. His manner was folksy and his face craggy. He was clearly not a New Yorker. And what really stood out about him was the bullet hole in his head.
John’s first reaction was to step back, but just as before, when he’d been above the operating table, he found he couldn’t. Whether it was the unexpected viscosity of the floor or just plain stress he couldn’t tell, but his feet remained in position and he had to fight to retain his balance for a moment.
“Whoa! Take it easy, son! I ain’t going to hurt you!”
John sized him up and decided to take him at face value. If he were flesh and blood, he would hardly be a threat to John. Not only was John six-foot-two, but he was broad-shouldered, with the natural build of an athlete, which he kept lean through lifting weights and playing basketball––factors that had probably just saved him from being crippled by the fall. He had to trust someone to help him, and he desperately needed information.
Without further reservation, he blurted out his frustrations like buckshot: “I don’t understand what’s happening! I shouldn’t be here! I should get back, but I can’t move.”
“Back to where, son?”
“To my body. To wake up! To end this…” He paused, unsure of whether to call it what he hoped it was, a “near-death experience.” He finally said the words, but even as he did so, John had an overwhelming feeling of impending dread—the dread of being told something that he didn't want to hear.
The man paused a moment before responding, his tone almost apologetic, “There’s nothing ‘near’ about it, son. If you’re here with me you’re dead…or as good as. Until we decide to move on, we stay on Earth like this.” He gestured with a sweep of his hand over his glowing form. “There is no other option that I’m aware of.” He then became silent, studying John’s face for a reaction.
The words slammed John hard, with the force of a revelation, leaving him in a momentary daze. “But I just had surgery! They took my body away! I was still alive!” he finally protested.
“Then it looks like the operation won’t be a success.” The tone was sympathetic but carried with it a sharp edge of conviction.
John’s head moved in a slow, disbelieving shake. “No. No. I can’t be dying. My life was just starting! You’re not real. You’re not real. This is some kind of dream…. or hallucination brought on by the drugs used in the surgery! That’s it!” He focused back on the man’s head and his gunshot wound, trying to make sense of why this stranger would appear to him in a dream and with both of them as glowing spirits.
“Nine-millimeter straight through the noggin’. Wrong place at the wrong time,” the man said, smiling in response to John’s apparent fascination with his wound. “If I ever find the son of a bitch…” His voice trailed off as if he himself had become weary of making what had become, over time, an idle threat. Then, unexpectedly, he pointed at John’s lower abdomen. Looks like you had a violent arrival here yourself! Knife wound…must’ve hurt!”
John looked down; there was a hole in his replicated clothing. He pressed a couple of fingers inside and found a gaping wound. It triggered a memory of seeing a flash of a steel blade before he fell to the sidewalk outside the pub. Startled, he pulled his fingers out and looked back at the man in disbelief and said, “I was attacked . . . I remember now. But I can’t remember much about how it happened, and I have no idea why anyone would want to stab me!”
“We’re all here to find answers. I didn’t even see the gun or the person who shot me. Never felt a thing!” The old man turned to show John the back of his head. Except there was no back. The exiting bullet had taken most of it away, leaving a crater in the wake of the eruption of brain and bone tissue. John gasped and was surprised he could still feel sick. Very sick. His body convulsed violently.
“Don’t worry. That’s everyone’s reaction, and you can’t actually throw up,” the man smiled. “One good thing is that this injury does come in handy.”
“How’s that?”
“The bad’uns leave me alone, at least the ones that are fresh to this world. I guess they figure that they can’t do anything worse to me. But the truth is the bad’uns can still harm us.”
“Bad’uns?” John repeated, unconsciously mimicking the man’s accent. His concern for his own safety had now overcome his temporary nausea.
“Yeah, spirits of dead people, like us but bad’uns. You know, muggers, thieves, killers…the same as in the mortal world but worse… The longer they stay here, the nastier they get and the more shit they do. Some of them even find homes in the bodies of the living and when they do…they make them do unthinkable things. Most of us spirit folk—those with any sense—stay away from them and the people they find homes in.” His expression turned serious again. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep out of their way, too.” He paused and sighed. “I know you want to believe this is all temporary, a dream of some sort. I wanted to when I arrived. I was confused and wanting answers just like you. Then a spirit I met told me something that I didn’t believe at first, but which, thirty years later, I’ve found to be true.
“What did he tell you? John interrupted impatiently.
“Simply that dreams are never this perfect. He mentioned that some details in this spirit world, when you compare it to the real world, are always out of whack, especially when they’re places you know really well. Unfortunately, he was right. I’ve been to places I spent years in when I was alive, and I’ve watched people I love grow old. Hell, I was the janitor here for most of my working life, and I know this hospital like the back of my hand. Everything, everywhere is perfect. Not one detail has ever been out of place. This ain’t no dream.”
John shook his head and struggled again to release his feet. He certainly didn’t want to be stuck in this spirit form forever, so he had to do something to start to re-orient himself. The only thing that seemed to make any sense at all to him was to find and stay with his physical body. Being close to it, he figured, might somehow allow him to wake up. His thoughts turned to Jennifer, the girl he’d met up with on the night of the stabbing and who he’d swiftly fallen for in a big way. He berated himself for not even considering her up until now. He had to see her. What if she had needed surgery? What if she was somehow experiencing the same things as he was? He dismissed the last thought as idiotic. Her injuries were far less serious than his. Her fall had knocked her out, but the knife had come only at him and he had remained conscious just long enough to see that no further harm would come to her until the paramedics arrived.
“Let me help you,” the man said, seeing John’s frustrated attempts to free himself. “Listen carefully. Learn to interact with your surroundings. Dirt and anything natural will support you because at the cellular level it’s made of the same pure stuff we are, but anything human-made is another matter. So right now, it is the dirt below the concrete floor that is supporting you. Don't ask me why it is this way. It's something to do with the balance of energy on earth. Now, pay attention. Use your will to control the energy in your foot so that it can release itself.” He motioned with his own foot, and allowed it to sink a few centimeters into the floor before it popped out again. “At first it takes a lot of focus just to touch a surface without slipping through it, let alone to sit or walk on one.” The old man said this so matter-of-factly, John thought it must have been a long time since the weirdness of this parallel reality had blown his mind. Now the old man just took it for granted.
John tried again, this time channeling all his thoughts into willing his foot to move. It started to shift, slowly. Like his hand had previously, it emerged from the storeroom’s floor with particles seeming to partially coat it. Afterward, the surface snapped back, with the same dissipating ripple as before. He lowered his foot hard, expecting to make contact with the surface, to push against the floor and pull his other foot out. Instead, it shot through, returning his
foot to the same sunken level as before.
"Concentrate and imagine interacting with the surface you want to push against, then when you want to take, say, your foot off that surface, imagine breaking those interactions.”
John tried again, this time imagining the atoms in the sidewalk held together by bonds of energy. He could picture it well, thanks in no small part to his physics classes with fat Mr. Jeffries back in Dublin. The teacher’s remarkable stealth in slamming down a two-foot, Perspex ruler on the desk of anyone inattentive had kept his pupils focused.
Next, John imagined the energy buzzing through his feet, pushing against the energy holding the millions of atoms together in the surface of the floor. Then it happened: he felt a sensation of resistance, which he pushed against until he was standing on the floor.
He nodded at the spirit of the old man in cautious appreciation, and then, as he lost concentration, he dropped nearly a whole inch into the floor. Re-focusing, he pushed himself back up to ground level, feet now contacting firmly with the floor surface.
“Don’t worry about walls, you’ll pass through them like you did through the floors when you landed here! In fact, the less you think about going through them, the easier you’ll find it.” The old man encouraged.
John walked toward the storeroom door. It was a less-than-graceful journey as he seemed to disappear into invisible holes that appeared whenever he lost focus. He stopped to turn around to thank the old man.
“Second floor,” the old man said before John could say anything.
John look confused.
“You’re not the first newbie to drop in on me,” the old man smiled. “The operating theaters are above us and, with your knife wound, I figured that’s where you must have come from. The ICU is on the same floor, and I expect that’s where your body is now, after the surgery. We’re in the basement, but I’d take the stairs if I were you. The elevator might be a bit advanced at this stage. You don’t want to fall down the elevator shaft.”
John raised his hand in thanks and turned back toward the closed door.
“Straight through without thinking, remember!” the old man called out.
John did as he’d advised and immediately found himself in a long and empty corridor. As he walked along it looking for an exit into the stairwell, someone in a janitorial uniform crossed the corridor in front of him, walking across from one room to another, completely unaware of John’s presence. He felt unnerved by being able to see people without them seeing him. Almost like a superpower, he thought.
He found the door to the stairs, passed through it, and started his ascent, which he figured would be a time-consuming exercise of trial and error.
Three
In her concussed state, Jennifer Miller was unaware of the intense hammering noise coming from the coils of the MRI scanner at Queens Bayview Hospital. It was mapping out a slice-by-slice image of the innards of her brain. At that very moment, her neurons were firing as her unconscious mind retrieved an experience from her childhood, re-awakening something deep within her.
It had happened on a hot June day. She was eight and walking home from school. Raindrops began to fall from a bright but cloudy Miami sky, and the air became thick with an earthy smell. From a distance, she saw her grandmother waving to her from the bedroom window of her parents’ house. Her mother and father worked long hours, and so her grandmother was always home to greet her in this way. She was easy to recognize from a distance by her short, white hair. It was exceptional for its lack of gray or yellowish tint. Jennifer had often marveled at that hair. It was symbolic of a purity that she had always associated with her grandmother.
Jennifer waved and smiled as she continued walking. She stopped for a moment, held up the index finger of her right hand, and closed her left eye. The blurred image of her grandmother was no bigger than her fingernail. It was a trick her father had shown her some time ago, but the optical illusion still amused her.
In the split-second between lowering her hand and her eyes re-focusing, Jennifer thought she saw an orange glow surround her grandmother. Then the figure disappeared from the window. It was odd, but she put it down to a trick of the light. Continuing to trudge onward, lugging her book-laden backpack on her small frame, she felt nothing unusual or any sense of dread. She stepped with relish into newly formed puddles in her bright red sandals. The rainwater was just starting to seep through her white cotton socks, making them feel mushy, when suddenly, she felt an icy breeze wrap around her. The sensation caused her to stop abruptly and gasp for breath. A shiver raced along the skin of her exposed legs, then her arms, leaving the tiny hairs standing momentarily upright. The icy feeling lingered a moment on her face and neck, giving her the impression of the gentlest of caresses, then just as suddenly, it was gone, replaced with the dense warmth of the summer rain.
Jennifer was, by then, just a few steps from her parents’ front door. She felt a strange hesitation overcome her, a sensation of inexplicable fear. Finally, she proceeded and rang the bell. Time appeared to slow down as she waited, the harsh mechanical ring of the doorbell gradually fading into silence. She finally heard footsteps approaching the door. They sounded heavy and hesitant. Too heavy to be made by Grandma’s frail frame. The lock clicked open. Her father, David, greeted her with a warm smile, but his shoulders were slumped and his brow was furrowed. He spoke softly, battling against pressed lips and an inward gaze. He told her that her beloved grandmother had died in the hospital from a massive stroke three hours earlier. The words floored her.
By the time John reached the landing between the first and second floors, he had climbed three flights of stairs, each one requiring a little less concentration than the previous one in order for him to maintain contact with the floor’s surface. A window provided a welcome opportunity to look at something other than the harshly lit concrete walls and to take a rest.
It was night, but New York never sleeps, is never completely dark, and a hospital in Queens was no exception. Despite the hour, which he guessed must be sometime in the early morning, the nearest rows of spaces in the visible part of the brightly lit parking lot were already full, and the street beyond busy with a constant flow of traffic. The faint bounce of jackpot lights from an emergency vehicle on the windshields and paintwork of the parked cars indicated that the entrance to the ER must be nearby.
All was as it should be, with one exception. Amid the groups of people urgently making their way to the emergency wing and those returning to their cars at a more casual pace, John could see glowing areas of orange light. There they were! More spirits, just like him and the old man. Each one of them must be a perfect copy of a once-living person, he figured. And each one was a part of an unseen, additional layer to the physical world that he had thought he knew and understood. He looked out toward the distant street and noticed these spirits everywhere—part of the nighttime illumination––specks of orange moving with cars, buses, and taxis. He noticed the glowing figure of a girl, probably no more than twelve years old, following a couple who may have been her parents to their car. His heart went out to her as he imagined her fear and loneliness. As he did so, he felt himself slipping through the floor.
Fighting to regain his focus, he saw his father’s silver Maserati pull up just as the spirit of the girl and her parents drove away. John saw the burly figure and shining bald head of Jim Donovan exiting the building below him. The Irishman hustled awkwardly toward John’s father. His hairy, tattooed arms were slightly raised and he was patting the air with his downward-facing palms in a gesture, indicating to John’s father to calm down. They had been good friends since their schooldays in Ireland, but the contrast between them couldn’t have been greater. John’s father was wearing a tailored suit and his short, steel hair was neat and well-cut above a pair of steel-framed glasses. He was the very picture of a successful property developer. John doubted if Donovan even owned a suit—he seemed to always wear the same scruffy jeans and faded black t-shirt—and his only business,
O’Donnell’s Irish Pub, looked like it was on its last legs, even with all the financial help John’s father had given him.
He followed the signs to the ICU, heading down a corridor dead-ended by a set of closed doors with a keypad entry and intercom. A sign warned that visitors were allowed through only with the permission of the patient’s doctor. There was a small waiting area to the left of the doors. It was empty. His father and Jim Donovan hadn’t yet arrived. The top half of the doors had glazed panels and he peered through them. The ICU was a large, dimly lit space, lined on either side with individual patient rooms. Walking through the closed doors—his first passage through glass—was unnerving. The glass, being thin and transparent, felt like a suffocation bag as it wrapped around his face before peeling away.
He figured finding his own body and Jennifer shouldn’t be too difficult. Most of the privacy blinds to the individual rooms were open, revealing the occupants and their life-support systems. Two nurses sat hunched together at a central station, their faces lit up by the glare of computer monitors. Above them, an LED wall clock read 01:20 a.m.
He approached the fifth room on his right, and his mood lifted at the very sight of her before feelings of pity and love overcame him. She was lying flat on her back with her face upward, her slender body and graceful limbs now still, her blue eyes, which had only yesterday shone with delight at the sight of him, now closed and shut off to the world. He came closer to her bed and marveled at her profile, the elegant and perfect proportions of her chin, nose, and mouth. He remembered seeing her for the very first time on his first day at his new high school when he had strolled into class late with casual overconfidence All the students had turned around to see him, but it was Jennifer’s profile, as she turned to catch a brief glimpse of the newcomer, that had caught his eye, and a slow-budding flirtation had bound them together ever since.
