Out of Body

by Jeffrey Ford

  Since he took the entire experience to be a dream, he decided to draw closer to Mrs. Hultz’s house and see what she was watching. The lighted window looked in over her shoulder. She sat in an old armchair upholstered with pink flowers. He saw her blue-white hair, the frame of her enormous glasses, and her arm bending, bringing the crystal gin to her lips. One glance at the TV, and he saw she was watching some old black-and-white movie. The quiet scene was a tableau of loneliness, but Owen felt it peaceful. There was a quick flash of Orson Welles’s face emerging from the shadows, and he knew it was Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Upon noticing Welles, he heard, very faintly, as if being played by a mosquito, the sound of zither music. He leaned his head closer to the window to better hear it. The classic tune came much clearer. In the next second, he realized he was leaning through the side of the house into Mrs. Hultz’s living room like something from a cartoon. The experience made him shudder, which shook loose a memory of Helen dead behind the counter. In an instant, he was reeled in, rolled up, and everything went black.

  3

  THE NEXT MORNING, Owen ate breakfast and drank his coffee at the kitchen table instead of stopping for a roll. He’d plotted out on his phone a new route that didn’t take him anywhere near the Busy Bee. There was one lone sparrow on the feeder. The weather was cool and breezy but the sun was bright. On any other morning, he’d have thought it a perfect day, but now he thought of nothing except for what had happened to him the night before. He’d obviously had an episode of lucid dreaming, but the look of the dream was sharper, as were his senses during it. It was a twin for real life, except he was some kind of spirit who could pass through the walls of houses and was truly conscious while doing it. He promised himself he would write down the experience as soon as he returned from work that evening. He put on the brown suit. As it grew time to leave, he felt an ice ball forming in his chest. He hoped not to speak to anybody about the death of Helen Roan.

  At the first corner on the walk to town, he turned west onto another tree-lined street that looked like the one he lived on. There was something “skulking” about the fact he had changed his route. He felt like a thief in the night, and walked swiftly, keeping his eyes on the cracked concrete. There came a spot where he had to walk along a dirt road that led into the shadows beneath the cedars and blackjack oaks. It was as if all those things he didn’t want to think about might be hiding in ambush behind the trees and underbrush. He heard their murmuring, the distant gunshot, and caught, in a side glance, Helen darting into a thicket. He finally came to the old railroad tracks and crossed them. A few steps later and he was clear of the woods, walking across the field of weeds toward the library.

  Owen spent the morning on his office computer. First, he checked the local TV listings and found that The Third Man had actually been on the previous night. Then he read up on lucid dreaming and the astral plane. Everything he read had a tangential connection to what he’d experienced, but none of the experiences of others, in their descriptions, were close to his. He determined that what happened through the night was an out-of-body experience, an OBE. He’d read on more than one site that the phenomenon could be brought on by a head injury or great stress. He rubbed the wicked bruised bump on his jaw and envisioned a type of spirit persona leaving his body in order to wander the night world of reality, not dreams. The experience of a phantom—a silent, incorporeal witness to the workings of the world. As this conclusion dawned on him, he heard the chimes at the library’s front door. It would be the first patron of the day.

  He walked out to the front desk to see a man in a tweed jacket and dark glasses standing with a camera in his hands. Before Owen could speak, the man said, “I’d like to ask you about the robbery at the Busy Bee.” He leaned his elbows on the counter, trying to appear familiar.

  “I gave a statement to the police yesterday at the hospital,” said Owen. “You can go to the station and check it out. Use that for your copy. I’m not offering any interviews.”

  “Not even for your local paper? People want to hear about you. You’re a hero for trying to help.”

  “I’m not a hero,” said Owen. “The whole thing happened so fast, I was hit in the face and unconscious before I even knew what was going on. I was a helpless bystander. Seriously. Go write that for the paper. It’s the truth,” he said, knowing full well it wasn’t quite.

  “I’ll take it,” said the reporter. “That’s something no one else is writing.” With this, he lifted the camera and snapped a quick shot of Owen.

  “These are business hours,” said the librarian in his sternest voice.

  The man backed away toward the door. “Thanks,” he said. The chimes sounded again and he was gone.

  The remainder of the afternoon was dead, as if the library’s usual patrons assumed the place was closed from having heard the news about the robbery. It was fine by Owen. He took up the usual work chores—reshelving, sending overdue notices, and weeding the collection for books that could be sacrificed to make room for newer books. This was the most difficult part of his job. He held in his hands a book from the children’s section with duct tape holding it together. Even with all the obvious repairs, the cover was still half torn off from the spine. You could no longer see the illustration of an old woman in a rocking chair with kids gathered around her. The book was titled The Daily Reader. It was one of his favorites when he was a kid. It told stories about a family—husband and wife with a girl and a boy, six and seven, and a new baby. There was a story for every day of the year. Some were involved and some were very brief, like the entries in a person’s diary. The reader got to be there for the big events and for the inconsequential. Owen, as a child, found the latter the nicest of all. Still, his warm memories of the story year he spent with that story family were not enough to stay his hand from tossing the decrepit volume into the trash bin. It was to be replaced on the shelf by a book about a boy who lived on an island and what happened when a coffin washed ashore. He hoped the kids who still came to the library would enjoy it as much as he’d enjoyed The Daily Reader.

  A few minutes before closing, the chimes sounded again. Owen made his way out from amidst the stacks. There was nobody on the adult side of the library. He walked over to the children’s section and saw a man standing with hands behind him, looking up at the mural on the back wall.

  “Can I help you?” asked Owen. “We’re about to close for the day.”

  The man turned and revealed himself to be Gerry Roan, owner of the Busy Bee and Helen’s father. Owen was staggered. He couldn’t even bring himself to say hello, although he’d known the man since they were both young. Instead, he shook his head as if vehemently denying something.

  “I’ve come to see how you were. I heard you’d been put in the hospital,” said Roan.

  Owen found his voice. “Gerry, I’m so sorry about Helen.”

  “Are you OK?”

  His spasm of denial ended and he was able to nod. “Don’t worry about me. Is your wife holding up?”

  “No, neither of us is very good. We can’t sleep.”

  “I wish I’d been able to do something,” said Owen.

  “What can you do?” said Roan. “Life really doesn’t make any sense. We all secretly know that. This guy was a drug maniac or something.”

  “Still . . .”

  “I’m just glad you were there with her when it happened. She always admired you from the time she was young. I think it was because you had so many books,” he said, and laughed.

  Owen didn’t react to the joke. An uncomfortable silence followed, and eventually Gerry Roan walked over to the librarian and hugged him. Without speaking, he left. The sound of his car starting and receding was followed by the peculiar tomb-like silence that settled down around the books at evening. The sunlight through the window then could be its most golden on the field for a brief few minutes. The thought of Roan’s statement that Helen admired him because he had so many books came back to him, and he moved quickly to try to dispe
l his sorrow. The unfamiliar walk home through the woods spooked him. By the time he came out the other side, along the dirt road, night had fallen.

  After dinner, he played the classical station on the radio. It turned out to be a big night for the music of Satie. Owen finished the bourbon and gave vent to all manner of bad notions, gave in to every paranoia, ran through the scene in the Busy Bee a dozen times behind his eyes. When it got late and he kept nodding off, his head banging once or twice against the kitchen table, even as drunk as he was, he knew it was time to surrender. He stumbled into the bedroom, knowing he’d have a rough time of it in the morning. Again, he forgot about the wound in his side, felt a jab as he was getting into bed, and had to switch to the right. He fell asleep almost instantly, but before he did, he managed to push himself onto his back, hoping to regain transit to the night world. His sleep was as dark as death, though. Not a shred of dream nor the fearful paralysis.

  He woke but a few minutes later to the sound of the alarm clock. The nausea and headache were nothing compared to the fact that, as he was dressing for work, he remembered that today was going to be a ceremony for Helen. The body was still in the custody of the police for autopsy and would be for a few more days. Helen’s parents didn’t want to wait for the inevitable closure. Her father had mentioned it before leaving the library. “Awfully quick,” Owen had thought, and put it out of his mind. The sudden, returning thought of it froze him where he sat on the edge of his bed, holding a pair of socks. He knew there was no way he could make it through the memorial and the looks and words, no matter how kind the citizens of Westwend. Owen was revealing himself to be more of a coward than even he’d suspected. Still, he dressed in his blue-gray suit and went to work, taking the new, secret route. He prayed no one would see him, and no one did.

  His suffering induced by the bourbon subsided around midday. There were patrons at a steady pace, and a pile of kids came in after school to work on projects together. Some of the adults mentioned the robbery to him. The older folks knew better than to blurt it out in conversation but smiled wistfully and patted him on the shoulder as he checked out their books. For the first time in a long time, he left early. It’s not like there was anyone around to evict, but he killed the lights and locked the door twenty minutes before closing.

  After making it home without being spotted, Owen grabbed the rolled-up newspaper from where it was shoved into the iron scroll work of the porch banister. He staggered inside and shut and locked the door behind him. He dressed in his shorts and T-shirt. Curling up in a corner of the living room couch, he propped himself with his elbow against the pillowed arm, and turned on the light above his head. The front page of the Westwend Tattler had a large photo of the ceremony for Helen Roan from earlier in the day. Owen skipped it. On page two was his “confession” that he was no hero.

  He felt so wronged by that one word—confession—as if he’d been leading the community on, been boasting about how he’d tried to disarm the murderer. He’d never claimed such a thing. All he was really guilty about was not telling everyone he was a straight-up coward, and who would go out of their way to say such a thing? The paper fell from his hands onto the floor. He rolled onto his back and stretched his legs out. His fingers just reached the light switch. In minutes he was mercifully out and lightly snoring.

  4

  THIS TIME THERE WAS no paralytic prelude; he began to ascend the instant he awoke in his sleep. Up through the attic like last time. Out through the roof on the left side, next to the chimney. And then he swept down as graceful as an angel and touched his feet lightly on the sidewalk. He wasn’t overwhelmed by the sheer strangeness of the experience this time. The first thing he noticed was that it must be much later than when he’d lain upon the couch. The houses were all dark, save for Mrs. Hultz’s. The moon was half of what it had been last he was on the night street. The sky was wondrously clear, with millions of stars.

  He slipped weightlessly along the sidewalk, and this time when he got to the corner, he turned away from town and instead toward the park and the pine barrens. Why he was heading in that direction, he had no idea. When he passed the Blims’ house, Hecate was lying on the front lawn, watching the street. Owen was afraid he’d be seen. He noticed that the dog did lift its head and sniff the air, but for once it didn’t bark. A few houses along the way, he spotted a lit window and wondered what was going on behind it at that late hour. He changed course and swerved across the lawn to have a look.

  The house was a ranch style with the windows close to the ground. Owen swore he wouldn’t invade other people’s homes in his invisible state. As far as spying on them, though, for some reason, that was another matter. He was infinitely curious about how people lived. In the well-lit room was a boy in red pajamas, somewhere between the ages of eight and ten. He was sitting at a small round table with two chairs. In between those two seats lay a chessboard. Owen watched as the boy made a move, ushering his queen from behind the defense of horses to attack. Then the boy got up, went to the seat opposite, sat and stared at the board, and made a move for that side. He was his own opponent. Familiar, thought the librarian. He’d never seen the boy before, and made a note in his memory to check if he was a patron of the library. He thought it might be worthwhile to get in some newer chess books.

  He traveled on, toward the end of the road, and just before the entrance to the park, he passed a driveway with a running car parked in it. He peered into the vehicle and saw, by the light of an e-reader in her hand, a young woman. She was fast asleep behind the wheel. In the dark back seat, there was a fat-faced baby, smiling and kicking its legs. Owen surmised it was some failed attempt to get the child to sleep.

  These acts he was witnessing would be seen by no one else. Night, its solitude and cover, gave a thrilling aspect to the mundane—like knowing a secret. What the secret was, he had no idea. But as he came to the end of the sidewalk at the entrance to the park, and took a step onto the gravel path, he formed a theory that people were probably most themselves after sunset. He walked along the path through the park, just east of the baseball diamond. It came to him that he didn’t want to wind up in the pine barrens in his phantom state. But a few feet on, he saw a waist-high sign that was a wooden arrow. It pointed the way to the cemetery of St. Ifritia.

  That’s how he found out why he was there. He’d come to pay his respects. He was in the cemetery where the event for Helen Roan had been held. A funeral without a body. He took the path to search for the grave marker awaiting her remains. His pale blue glow lit the headstones just enough so he could read them. As he crept along, he realized he was fulfilling some inner directive to atone for missing Helen’s memorial. He also became conscious of the fact that he was walking at night in a cemetery as a kind of ghost.

  He came to a gravesite near a tree bedecked with pink and white ribbons, and hung with strings tied to now-deflated balloons. The waist-high marble marker in front of the tree read IN MEMORY OF HELEN ROAN and gave her dates. At the foot of the marker was a gaping hole awaiting its cargo.

  With head bowed, he stood in silence and made his peace with Helen Roan. “I wish I could have saved you,” he whispered. He expected her spirit to fly out of the tree and admonish him for being a selfish coward. He occasionally had to remind himself that it wasn’t a fantasy land he now traveled but reality. That was the strangest part. He stood there for a time, hands folded in front of him, until he got the impression someone was watching him. Turning quickly, he saw no one. Slowly and quietly, he moved away from Helen’s headstone and back toward the path that led to the park.

  Moving clear of the rows of headstones, he turned and saw a figure, glowing pale blue like himself, moving toward him from a distance of five or six rows. Owen ran, but he found that running in the night world was like running on the moon. Because his spirit form was lighter, each thrust of the leg shot you way up but not necessarily very far forward. Owen leaped house high but was slowed in his escape. The other glowing figure caught u
p and told him to stop. When he floated slowly down from on high, the figure made to take his hand to ground him, but the hand passed right through his.

  She laughed as he made contact with the ground and bounced up a foot and a half.

  “Who are you?” asked Owen, finally settling and turning to see her. He could tell it was a woman through the pale blue glow. She wore a robe and a nightgown like Sleeping Beauty in the mural but with a much shorter hem and a lace collar instead of décolletage. Her hair was short, and he couldn’t tell because of its incandescence what color it would be in the waking world.

  “I’m a sleeper like you,” she said. And in that instant, he was called back, seemingly yanked by the collar, all the way across the park and back up his street, into his bed.

  At breakfast the next morning, instead of his usual contemplation of the rescue of Sleeping Beauty, he tried to recall the face of the woman he met in the night world. Another person having an out-of-body experience? He’d never considered the possibility. She called herself a “sleeper.” He wondered how many sleepers there were in the area, and if she might have recognized him from the library. On one hand, he found it wondrous that sleeping people could shed their corporeal selves and rise up to meet as spirits or phantoms in the real world. On the other hand, the thought carried a tinge of disappointment in that he’d treasured the quiet solitude of the night world.

  He took off for work along his secret route, impatient to be at the end of the day and to experience the phenomenon again. It was his plan next time to more carefully observe and to write down what he experienced. Nothing much happened at the library. Mrs. Hultz arrived at noon to read to whatever toddlers were brought in by their mothers or fathers for story time. No takers showed, so she waylaid Owen with her tales of distant relations and medical issues. Just before she had mercy and left his office, though, she told him she’d seen in that day’s newspaper an article about the gunman from the Busy Bee. The authorities didn’t have a name for him yet, but they mentioned a small black tattoo of a cross in a circle on his wrist that they believed to be a gang affiliation sign.