When I stepped out of my apartment building, the lack of air rushing past me felt odd. The gray sky and damp leaves caught in the crook of the curb made me rub my arms on instinct. The autumnal chill of my last moments still seemed to linger, freezing my bare feet.
I wasn’t sure what to do when I got to the back entrance of the nearest hospital, since I couldn’t touch anything. But I had to try looking, at least. There’d be paperwork about my death, perhaps a physical certificate. I just wanted to know how the coroner had ruled the cause, why my sister had literally gotten her hands dirty digging through my trash. Had she been looking for evidence I hadn’t offed myself—or confirmation?
As I passed through the closed doors and wandered through the eerily bare, almost unlit hallways, I still had it in me to shiver. I didn’t like hospitals. Especially not this lower floor, underground, practically a basement. If the frantic rushing to and fro on higher levels stressed me out, I didn’t expect the lack of it to be even more harrowing. No patients, no hurrying nurses and doctors. There weren’t any emergencies down here. The morgue attendant pushing a gurney in front of me had no cause to rush.
There probably shouldn’t have been two people sitting by the side of the hallway—on the floor, since there were no waiting room chairs on this level. One of them held a notebook and pen, with a messenger bag slouched by her side.
They were talking without looking at each other, the writer scribbling away while the speaker droned on. What had sounded like a conversation from a distance now struck me as more of a litany, with occasional commentary.
“Thomas… Thirty-six… Episcopalian…” he said.
“You’d think I’d be able to spell that by now,” she replied.
They looked pretty normal, even comfortable, sitting on the floor—the stout strawberry-blonde girl tucked into herself, and the lanky brown guy, still tall even hunched over. She wore a faded sweatshirt with pajama bottoms, her short hair pinned into a stub of a bun. He had on a jacket and jeans covered all over with patches and pins, curly hair bleached and dyed orange. I could’ve sat beside her in my college library during finals, bumped into him at a show back when I still ran in the scene.
The gurney took a turn, pirouetting on a stuck wheel, and passed right through both of them. They didn’t even stop talking.
“This isn’t happening,” he recited. “I’m dreaming.”
She sighed, or it might’ve been a yawn, if we could still do that. “If only.”
The writer must have died with that notebook and pen, taking her bag along with her clothes to the other side.
Once the morgue attendant righted the gurney and moved on, at last, the two of them looked up at me.
The speaker interrupted his own recounting. “We’ve got a live one.”
“So to speak,” said the writer, with barely suppressed excitement. “Can you see us?”
I shrugged. “You really need to ask?”
They turned to exchange eager glances, before she shoved her notebook at him, and they scrambled to their feet. I backed up as she drew closer.
“Hi there,” she said, her eyes alert, but voice a little flat, over-rehearsed. “We’re conducting a survey regarding your experience on this extranatural plane of existence. If you wouldn’t mind, we’d like to ask a few questions.”
My chest swelled up with a laugh. I swallowed it back down in surprise. “What the fuck?”
The speaker elbowed her. “Don’t just jump in.”
“Sorry,” she said irritably. “I forgot.”
He apparently had to demonstrate how to talk to a stranger. “I’m Carlos,” he said. “This is Danny.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Danny tried.
“Or, well, not so nice,” admitted Carlos. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I would rather he didn’t remind me. “Why sorry? Did you push me?”
He just laughed, like he hadn’t caught the edge in my tone.
Danny couldn’t wait any longer. “Now could you answer our questions?”
I crossed my arms. “So… you guys aren’t waiting on your own autopsies? This is like ambulance chasing, but way worse.”
Carlos muttered something in her ear. It sounded like, “Told you so.” He turned to me. “I know, we’re a little short of the welcome party you might’ve expected.”
“Where else are we supposed to find an adequate sample size?” asked Danny. “There’s no better place to meet people than the morgue.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t just get here,” I said. Not to mention that I hadn’t been all that bothered, at least not as much as someone following their body down here out of separation anxiety. “What kind of answers are you even getting out of baby ghosts?”
“More than you might think,” said Danny. “If all our experiences are consistent, that’s worth documenting. With enough data, we might be able to draw some reliable conclusions regarding the nature of our new state of being.”
She sounded practically academic. Like I was back in college, taking part in a psych department study.
“Are you sure you’re not on the clock, professor?”
Her face went a touch pink. “Actually, I’m still working on my master’s.”
“Still?”
“Well, no one’s going to hand it to me on a piece of paper, but I’d like to think I’ll earn it, anyway.”
So she’d found something to do with herself on this side. I couldn’t begrudge her that. Some other wandering souls might appreciate this sorry little welcoming committee. Better than thinking they were all alone.
“What about you?” I asked.
“I have zero qualifications,” said Carlos, holding up his hands to surrender any possible responsibility. “I’m only here to look pretty.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that. He did, in fact, look pretty.
And maybe they could help me out.
“Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s make it quick.”
Danny grinned, then smoothed out her face and voice professionally. “So, ideally, I would have gotten to perfect this questionnaire with some more resources before field-testing it, but, well, these aren’t ideal circumstances, so bear with me. These are all open-ended questions, by the way, so feel free to elaborate, all right? Are you ready?”
Taking her notebook back, she cleared her throat. “Tell me what you think is happening to you right now.”
“I’m dead.”
Her lips pursed, like that hadn’t been as elaborate an answer as she’d hoped. “Did you witness your separation from your body?”
What a nice way to ask if I’d watched myself die. And I had, my soul splitting off early enough for me to see the whole thing.
“Uh-huh.”
At least she didn’t want any more details on that. “Let’s talk about where we are in terms of metaphysical location.”
That gave me more to chew on. It felt like I’d been called on during a lecture and had to bullshit an answer on the spot. “I guess we’re on another plane of existence. Souls wandering around like—what’s it called in the Bible? I think it’s ‘heavenly bodies’?”
After eighteen years of Mass every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening, not to mention Catholic school, I still remembered perfectly, right down to the verse: 2 Corinthians 5. I wished I didn’t.
“Though we’re not in heaven,” I added. “Obviously.”
Danny couldn’t hide a slight smile, so that must’ve been a meaty enough response for her. “Any thoughts on our apparent bodies?”
“That’s it, exactly.” I found myself waving my hands to demonstrate. “They must be apparent. Apparitions. Based on our memories, or something. You ever heard of phantom limbs?”
“Isn’t that how you explained it?” asked Carlos.
She elbowed him. “Shh, shh, she doesn’t need my theories, we need hers.” Then she moved on. “Is it possible to ‘cross over,’ and if so, how is it done?”
“I hope we’re not going anywhere,” I said. I really didn’t want to follow that line of questioning to its conclusion.
“But do you think there is another destination for us?”
My fists bunched up involuntarily, but I slowed my exasperated hiss down to an innocent exhale. “Well, otherwise, we’re stuck here, right? Only, it’s not jam-packed, from what I’ve seen. All the other billions of people who have died over human history had to go somewhere. If it splits into the usual above and below, I know which direction I’m going—not up.”
That got a smirk from Carlos.
Danny took a while to catch up writing. I envied her having something to touch, the scratching such a satisfying noise. After her pen went still, she stalled the next question, clearing her throat nervously. “Would you describe any people you may have met on this plane as… disturbed?”
“Come again?”
“We’re still workshopping that question,” said Carlos.
“What do you mean ‘disturbed’?”
His eyebrows flickered up. “You’d know.”
Danny tapped the end of the pen against her lips. “Now, would you mind giving us some, you know, statistical information? Name, age, religious affiliation.”
“Mal,” I said. “Twenty-seven. I used to be your typical bitter, agnostic ex-Catholic.”
I used the past tense on account of not feeling so agnostic anymore, post-mortem.
She didn’t ask me to elaborate any further, turning toward her companion. “Did you get all that?”
Carlos cleared his throat. “I’m dead, uh-huh, I guess we’re on another plane…”
“Didn’t you just write that down?” I asked.
Danny gave her notebook a shake. “We have to rewrite all the data we’ve collected.”
“Why?”
“It goes back to blank pages every day. Nothing here lasts. If you die with, I dunno, some gum in your bag, and you try to chew it, eventually it’ll disappear and turn up back in its wrapper. It all goes back to the time of death.”
Carlos echoed my words again to himself, looping until they could get the chance to write it down. “I know which direction I’m going…”
I shivered. “Well, good luck with your research.”
“Thank you so much for participating,” said Danny.
Carlos smiled and waved, still muttering to himself. “Mal, twenty-seven…”
That was quite enough socializing for me. But I had a question for them. “How do I touch?”
“Hmm?” Danny barely looked up, already sucked back into her writing.
“I mean, are we able to touch anything? On the other side?”
I remembered the way she’d elbowed him. For a moment, I’d forgotten what we were, how significant it was that they could still touch each other, if nothing else.
Carlos held out his palms apologetically. “We can’t.”
“Not as far as we know,” said Danny.
“Oh, I tried,” he added. “I didn’t get anywhere.”
Well, shit.
“And you haven’t met anybody who can do it?” I asked. “Never thought to put that in as a question?”
Carlos turned to her with a thoughtful shrug. Danny nibbled her pen. Even if they took my advice, though, that wouldn’t exactly help me right now. And I’d been patient enough.
I couldn’t keep from rolling my eyes. “Thanks for nothing.”
Before they could react, I turned and walked through the wall—straight into the autopsy suite. After a brief eyeful of naked corpse and shiny surgical buzz saw, I put my head down and kept walking.
On the other side, I found a small, cluttered office. There were tons of filing cabinets, full of potentially relevant documents and a computer. But sheer need didn’t make my fingers any more solid. My hands disappeared through the manila folders as if I’d dipped them in murky water. I couldn’t get the computer to spark to life, either, like a TV in a horror movie.
At this point, I could safely assume I had about a fifty-fifty chance of my death being either correctly ruled as accidental, or lazily written off as a suicide. If they did a toxicology report, the tiny bit of alcohol in my system could’ve pointed to either. It might come down to how much paperwork the cops had bothered to do.
So I couldn’t rely on any authorities to comfort Cris. For all I knew, she didn’t believe the official cause, anyway, looking for her own answers. Nobody could convince her but me. I had no clue how to go about piercing the veil when I couldn’t so much as lift a pen to try and communicate, but I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.
As a good Catholic, she still believed in hell. And suicide was supposed to be a mortal sin—first-class boarding.
All things considered, I didn’t mind being stuck in the terminal for now.