A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  I looked intently at Roy, hoping for some reassurance myself.

  “No, o’ course not. Boner doesn’t really have a good idea o’ what he looks like or looked like. That’s why I gotta help ’im along. But your daughter? She’s one o’ the architects who built this bridge to the other side. So she’s gonna rock.”

  Triana clasped her hands on her lap as she swept her gaze around the network of television screens that were visible even up to the second-floor hallway. “Will we still be able to consider her . . . alive?”

  “My dog’s alive,” Roy said with an emphatic nod. “I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t touch ’im, hear ’im, or see ’im like I used to. But it’s like my best friend never left. He’s right there.” He gestured at the empty space at his feet. “I’m still figurin’ out how to get audio and all that. But, I know—this is just the beginnin’.”

  A spasm seemed to course through Triana, and she clutched a hand over her chest. “Oh, I can’t believe I’m considering killing my own daughter.”

  She’d finally said out loud the horrible reality I’d been denying. I clenched my gut and gritted my teeth so hard, every part of me hurt.

  “Yo, now, you shouldn’t be thinkin’ of it as ‘killin’.” Roy moved towards her and cupped a hand on her shoulder. “It’s more like helpin’ someone ‘transition.’ You take someone from bein’ a mortal to bein’ an electromagnetic entity in a disc. That makes ’em eMortal.” He grinned. “See what I did there?”

  Triana closed her eyes, laid her hands over her solar plexus, and took several deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again, she nodded and smiled at Roy. “Well, I’ve no doubt your best friend is happy and content, even now.”

  “Damn straight.” Roy held two thumbs up. “Death sucks, but we can lick it.”

  I sank onto the couch with a sigh—and it came out louder than I’d expected. I glanced at Triana and found her eyeing me. Probably gauging my ability to do what needed to be done—or my resolve to go ahead with it.

  She leaned closer and tapped me on the knee. “Do you know why I wholeheartedly believe every person has a soul?”

  I nodded. “Because of your near-death experience.”

  “Because I’m one of a set of triplets.” She opened her purse and took out her cell phone and began scrolling through its files. “My sisters—Ana and Diana—and I were split from the same egg. But I’m different from them. My mother said my sisters were born laughing. I was born thinking.” She handed me the phone showing a photograph of three baby girls, two of them smiling, the third one staring at the camera with brooding eyes. “As I grew up, I realized it’s because I was born with memories and fears that neither of them had.”

  “Whaddaya mean ‘memories?’” Roy squeezed himself onto the couch to have a look at the photo.

  “I grew up with an irrational fear of getting beaten up—but only by my father. In fact, everyone thought it’s why, as a toddler, I wanted to be called Triana Malarney. They assumed it was a name I made up to dissociate myself from my phobia.” She dug for something else inside her bag. “I was a teenager when I died and saw my body from above. I heard and saw things going on around me even after my heart had stopped beating. Then it’s as though an unseen force sucked me up through the ceiling and into a peaceful darkness, heading towards an unearthly light.” She pulled out a letter envelope from her bag and held it with both hands on her lap. “Then I found myself in a sunny, beautiful place full of flowers and trees. And I could hear people and glimpse them in the woods all around me, waiting for me with such overwhelming love and joy, I felt it even from a distance.”

  She paused and shuddered as she sighed, as though still savoring those feelings. “Years later, in medical school, I figured out all those sensations had come from my brain, making sure that I relaxed and didn’t get in the way of my body’s efforts to save itself. It was a natural high to sedate me. That is, until I came to a brook. A barrier I had to cross, like a deadend.” She looked Roy and me in the eyes. “I think this was when my ‘hyper will to survive’ came into play. I believe, at that point, my brain had shut down.”

  Roy inched forward in his seat, while I stayed frozen waiting for the rest of her story.

  “Someone appeared beside me. At first, I thought it was my mom, then I realized it was a younger version of my grandma who’d passed away years ago. She told me to go back and be the good mother I was meant to be. But I didn’t want to. Not because of what she’d said but because of something I felt. Something right there, in the woods, and I had to keep going to find out what it was.”

  The envelope in her hand teased at my curiosity.

  “Everything was brighter on the other side of the brook, and I couldn’t see beyond the glare. I put one foot in to test the water, and things started to feel awry. It seemed like my other foot got rooted to the ground, and I couldn’t tug it free. And then I had this . . . suctioning sensation. As though the water in the brook was flowing stronger and its gurgling grew louder until it was all I could hear. I strained to see something beyond the light. Or hear something beyond the rush of the stream. But there was nothing.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment as if to relive her own death. “I pulled my foot out of the water, and things grew calm again, and I found myself suddenly gifted with hyperthymesia. Quite the opposite of amnesia, because suddenly, I remembered everything. Knowledge. Skills. Things I’d long forgotten—and other things I thought I never knew. It was a panoramic view of all my memories—both conscious and subconscious. As though my brain had lifted all its checkpoints, detours, and road blocks so I could have access to every conceivable reason I had to live. In a singular moment, every teardrop. Every smile. Every love was put within my grasp. To jolt my will into fighting for a reason to stay.” She paused and breathed deeply. “It was a lifetime in a glance. In fact, it was more than one lifetime because that’s when I chanced upon Stuart.”

  “Who the heck’s Stuart?” Roy asked.

  “Apparently, he was my son—from a previous life.”

  “No shit.”

  I glanced at the envelope again, even more intrigued.

  “Of course, I had no idea who he was right away. Because suddenly he was just there. I was walking down a path, then I turned around and saw this little boy running towards me being chased by a man whom I knew was my father. But not my real father. It was some other man I’d never seen before, and I saw him hold up a stick about to hit that boy.

  “I screamed and called out his name then ran back to save him. Then I realized, at that instant, that boy was my son, and I couldn’t leave him with that man. The next thing I knew, I was being sucked back through a sea of white light, until I could hear the doctors and nurses again. And I begged them, in my mind, not to let me die so I could find a way to help Stuart.”

  She handed me the envelope, and what it held was a yellowed reproduction of a newspaper clipping from the early 1930s. The article spoke of a preacher man who had beaten his stepdaughter to death. The woman was survived by her “bastard son”—a boy named Stuart Malarney.

  The story could have just been something she’d heard as a child, which had stayed hidden in her subconscious until it resurfaced when she’d “died,” and yet it had wielded power over her life’s choices ever since. “Is this why you never married? To protect your children from their fathers?”

  “Four different men. Four different reasons, Bram,” she said curtly.

  Roy tugged the paper for a better view of it, and the image of the Labrador on the TV monitor ambled over as if to have a look too.

  “The good news is, I never felt any fear towards my real father again. Eventually, I traced their death certificates and learned that the boy, Stuart, had died from pneumonia the same year his mother did. The preacher man died years later in prison.”

  She took the clipping from Roy, folded it, and slipped it back into the envelope. Boner settled down and scratched at fleas that didn’t exist.

&nb
sp; “I’m not alone, Bram. Many others can find evidence that their past-life memories can be traced to someone real. Do you realize what all this means?”

  “That our memories don’t die with us?”

  “And that they seek to live again!” She said it as though she’d just made the discovery. “Past-life memories manage to reintroduce themselves into living, breathing human beings. As phobias. As recurring dreams. As unexplained memories or even skills from a previous life. How else do you think instinct was born?”

  “Say again?”

  “Not everything you know was taught by an elder. Millions of creatures are born and left to fend for themselves without a single lesson on how to survive. They’re born with the knowledge to avoid the terror of a fall, the scent of a predator, the taste of poison—valuable information one normally acquires at the brink of death. Past-life memories are tiny morsels of ingredients stuffed into the recipe that makes up who we are. Sometimes those morsels enrich the broth, but others—like phobias—simply spoil it.”

  “You’re shittin’ me. You’re sayin’ there’s parts o’ hyperwills inside all of us?”

  “They fight to stay alive. That horse’s soul you found in the barn. Thomas in the church basement. Stuart’s mother in my memories. And, I believe, my daughter’s unfounded fear of dark and tight spaces. These are all fragments of souls that sought refuge in different places, by different means, some way, somehow—because they never crossed the barrier.” Triana looked at me with eyes that were like a balm to my spirit. “This willdisc can be a repository for Torula’s soul. It can buy time for medical science to repair her body—until she can move back in.” She held the envelope up towards me. “To find the strength to escape death, all my daughter needs is someone like this.”

  I cocked my head, quizzically.

  She tapped the envelope against my chest. “You’re her Stuart Malarney. You’re her reason to fight to stay alive.”

  Her words seemed to suck the air from out of me; I could barely breathe.

  “The Japanese have a word for it,” she said. “Ikigai. Torula’s father had taught it to me. It means ‘that which makes life worth living.’ And I realized its power—while I was dead—and it became clear to me. All that life needs to do is to find the reason and the will to say ‘no’ in order to go on living.” Triana gazed at me with wisdom that sparkled from inside. “That’s all it is, really. Life is the ability of any bit of matter—or energy—to say no to the god of physics when it gives the command to decline into disorder. Life, simply put, is the ability to disobey. We prevail. We adapt. We heal. We fight to maintain our present existence. Even bacteria use that ability. Even viruses do. And I bet—so does a hyperwill.”

  And so will Torula. That’s what Triana’s eyes seemed to say. If only I could completely believe it, because all I saw ahead of me was dark, unknown territory, and I was too scared to take another step.

  “I need to bring her back,” I said. “Back into her body after she heals. I still don’t know how to do that, or if it can even be done.”

  Triana grew silent and stared at the Labrador on the screen. Boner’s image glanced at her, as though sensing her apprehension. “You said it took several hours to upload the dog’s hyperwill into the willdisc?”

  “Yeah,” Roy said.

  “Well, if you can find a way to work around that problem, the rest of it should be easy.”

  Did she just say “problem?” Acid bubbled in my gut. “What . . . problem?”

  “Like you said, we need to put Torula’s mind back into her body. It’s not something you had to consider for Roy’s dog. But with Torula, we’ll need to bring circulation back within four minutes, or else her brain will start to die.”

  She might as well have loaded a gun, cocked it, and aimed it right between my eyes. I desperately riffled through the formulas in my head, but all were tied to the factor of time. The conclusion was resounding: A peaceful death for Torula would be out of the equation.

  “HolyshitOMGfuck.” Roy had said all there was to say.

  Triana took a deep and calming breath. “For her to come out without any neurological dysfunction, whoever performs this procedure will need to lower her body temperature to 18 degrees to buy you time.”

  “How much time?” I mentally recalculated with the factor of temperature in mind.

  “As far as I know, about half an hour. But someone must have figured out a way around that limit by now.”

  “Someone?” I stood up and paced as if walking would help me get past a deadend. “No number of experts can come up with an answer that doesn’t exist.”

  “I’m not saying no one has the answer. I just don’t know of anyone who does.” Triana shrugged. “But I’m sure the two of you can figure it out.”

  “Hell, I don’t have a frickin’ clue either.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about Bram and my daughter. He’ll work on this side, she from ‘the other side.’”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.” Pain gnawed at the wall of my stomach, and I rubbed over where I felt the acid eating its way through. “I’ve been reading about other options out there for extending life beyond death. There’s whole brain emulation. Computer-Brain Singularity. 4D Brain Engin—”

  “Hell no,” Roy said. “Think o’ the soul, man. Think o’ the soul! Listen to all the stuff you just said. They’re all just focused on the brain. Nothin’ but the brain. But your nerves extend to the ends o’ your fingers and the tips o’ your toes. And we got an EM field extendin’ way beyond what our body hair can reach. It’s a mistake to think the human mind is stuck inside the skull.”

  “I agree,” Triana said. “What lies in the homo sapiens sapiens’ head is a most elegant and logical processor—but it doesn’t do the data gathering. It just sits there in the dark, waiting, untouched by light, and yet it lets you see. No pain receptors, and yet it makes you feel. We can observe the brain giving the orders, but it listens to an army of mindless advisors that have never ever been inside a skull.” She glanced at the image of Boner on the TV screen, scratching his imaginary fleas. “Just look at him. Full of memories of the life he left behind with no brain getting in the way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “That three-pound gray and white organ in your head comes loaded with features the soul absolutely doesn’t need. It has mufflers and blinders to ensure you don’t get distracted from what matters most for survival. Accidental savants, people who suddenly become prodigies or speak in a foreign language after a head trauma? I’m convinced these are people who suddenly have a damper or two unlocked—sometimes temporarily, others permanently. As for the rest of us with blinders intact, our past-life talents and abilities are held at bay by our brain because we don’t need all that irrelevant information to survive. It’s the same reason we’re all blind to the existence of ghosts.”

  Roy glanced at the invisible orb at his feet and petted it. “Heck, I’m not anymore.”

  Triana smiled and looked up the video of a dog that plopped down on its back for a belly rub. “The soul has a mind of its own, Bram. All your decisions are greatly influenced by a foolish proverbial heart, a mysterious gut feel, and a tingling in your loins. When you save a soul, you preserve even those things the brain doesn’t consider part of its job of keeping you alive.”

  I sank back onto the couch, afraid to embrace her assumptions—as comforting as they were—knowing it was a logical mind that Torula needed from me in order to survive.

  “Yo, why don’t we get Thomas to help?” Roy said.

  “Don’t be funny, Roy,” I said.

  “No, I’m serious. There’ll be all of us bashin’ our heads together over here, why don’t we give Jackson a brainstorm of ’er own on the other side?” He turned towards Triana. “Like I was tellin’ you earlier, I went back to that California mission, and the people there were kind enough to let me retrieve our ‘ghost bustin’ equipment’ from their basement. I bet Brig
hton can sneak you into the greenhouse so you can have a look at what we got in the willdisc.”

  “That would be grand,” Triana said. “It would ease my mind tremendously if I could see a human hyperwill thriving inside a willdisc.”

  “Hell, yeah. And if you get to speak with Thomas, you can offer ’im the job.”

  I gaped at them as my mind danced around the bizarre idea of recruiting an old friend of mine instead. Someone better qualified. Someone I had no bloody idea how to find on “the other side.”

  Triana raised a brow. “I must say, that’s not a bad suggestion. What have we got to lose?”

  “Not our minds, that’s for sure.” I raked a hand over my scalp. “Because we’ve all bloody lost ours already.”

  Roy edged closer. “Just one thing. You know that Brighton wants to talk to the hyperdude to set ’im free, right? So you just gotta make sure he doesn’t.”

  “I have to make sure? Don’t you mean we?” I said, waggling a finger between him and me.

  Roy then jabbed his own finger around at us to emphasize his pronouns. “We don’t have a reporter on our tail. It’s just me. So that leaves you. But I’m thinkin’ you’ll need Jackson.” He glanced at Triana. “I mean, your daughter Jackson. Thomas responds only when she’s around.”

  “That’s out of the question,” I said.

  “Then maybe you can bring ’er baby brother instead ’cause Thomas likes ’im too, right?”

  Triana tightened the scarf around her neck. “If you need a Jackson, then you’ll get one.”

  “No way,” I said. “You can’t expose Truth to—”

  “I’m the Jackson you need. My genes are the common denominator between your two mediums.”

  I balked at the suggestion. “Triana, you know how this thing debilitates its hosts.”