When I opened my mouth, to ask if I was going to be all right, I felt the vibrations in my teeth, felt them travel the short length of my tongue and echo out into the room. I clamped my mouth shut. Then, suddenly, the noise began to shift again, the pulses lunging with the force of ocean waves. I was having trouble breathing, and my fingertips went numb. My toes, too. Head swimming, vision bubbling, my legs fell out from under me, and I collapsed against the concrete. I was dying. Actually dying. This wasn’t another panic attack. The machine, somehow, it was disrupting my HeartNet. I was going to die in this stupid hole, in the dark, and what was worse, I’d put myself here. I’d volunteered for this.
I was having trouble focusing. All my thoughts and ideas, they were tiny bits of eggshell lost in the egg white, slippery, impossible to pin down beneath my fingertips. They were confetti before a monstrous floor-to-ceiling fan. I couldn’t hold on to a single word or image for more than half a second before it was whipped away, danced away into some outer cavity of darkness, a nothingness that seemed to surround and invade me. The darkness was crowding me out.
I began to panic. My life as Jim Byrd felt remote—even unlikely. It was something that had happened once, thousands of years ago, something I could hardly remember anymore, something that possibly had been a story I’d told myself. I’d made up Jim Byrd. How ludicrous that I’d ever been such a thing as him.
THE TALE OF SUBJECT 44
44: . . . There was no noise at all. Everything was impossibly quiet. A total absence of sound—and light. The darkest dark, all around me. I wasn’t me anymore. I was just a little dot. I had no attributes. No personality. I was barely there at all. I felt like a little sea creature tucked way up in the pointy end of the shell. Like I was hiding. This went on for a very long time. Centuries maybe. Aeons.
SZ: But eventually—
44: I began to realize that the darkness wasn’t really a nothingness. It was a substance. There was a ripple to it. Like a blanket or a curtain. I was moving through it now. In relation to what, I can’t say. But there was definitely movement. More than that, I had a destination. Before now, it hadn’t really occurred to me that I was alone, but this hit me all at once, how isolated and alone I’d been until this point. It hurt to be this alone. I felt like maybe I was the only thing that had ever existed. I can’t tell you how frightening that was. Slowly I began to remember that, once upon a time, I’d been a man named Jim Byrd. I’d had a life. I’d loved people. I was desperate to find these people. To find anyone—but especially them.
Far off, I began to see shapes.
SZ: Describe them.
44: Blurry bands of light. Thin, chalky. Light beams, I guess. A whole forest of them. The ones at the center of the forest were the strongest. They seemed to have gravity. They were pulling me toward them. I didn’t really try to resist. I was one of those beams, too, I realized. Is this normal?
SZ: Bands of light. Discs. Halos. Fiery planets. Flashbulbs. Starry nights. Yes, keep going.
44: There was a . . . crack. A giant crack right down my middle. Reality split in two. Suddenly I was in two places at once. A double-perception or a double-awareness—I’m not sure if there’s a technical term for it. I was a beam of light, traveling, but I was also me, Jim Byrd. I had a body again. Hands and feet. I had shape, mass.
I was young, about twenty-three, and I was in my office at the bank. The phone rang, and it was this guy I know, from school, and he was asking me for money, for a loan. Not from the bank but from me, personally. He’d lost a bunch of money on a basketball game, and now he was in trouble, and he needed some quick cash.
SZ: Just so I’m clear, this is an event that actually transpired in your life—or no?
44: Yes. This really happened to me once. But I wasn’t just remembering it. I was actually back in my office again. It was incredibly real. I could feel the phone in my hand. The side of my face closest to the window was warm. I told my friend that I didn’t have enough money to give him, which was sort of true but not quite, and once we were off the phone, I immediately started to worry about him. What if I’d totally screwed this guy’s life, you know? I had the ability to help and I’d turned him down.
Then, just like that, I wasn’t in my office anymore. I was in school again. Middle school. In the bathroom. I’d just thrown up my lunch, and I was trying to figure out what to do with my shirt because I had vomit all down the front. I took it off and scrubbed it in the sink but now it was wet. So I used a bunch of paper towels to try and clean it. The bell rang. I was going to be late for class. I put the shirt back on and started running. I was so worried about what the other kids would think. It was this worry, or fear, I think, that had brought me here, that had delivered me to this moment from the last. I’d been worried about my friend, the guy who needed the loan, but now I was worried about my shirt and being late. I’d caught a wave and washed up here, back in school.
My father was standing at the entrance to his classroom when I got there, holding the door open for me. He was my math teacher. He told me to get a move on and hurry it up. I hadn’t been to my locker yet so I didn’t have my books or my homework. When I tried to explain that to him, he shrugged and said he couldn’t help me. Sorry, bub.
He was going to treat me just like every other kid, and I hated him for it. I was so mad and hurt. I felt like he was trying to prove a point to the other kids. But then, as I passed, he noticed my shirt. How wet it was. And gross. Probably he smelled it on me. He told me to go to the nurse and wait there.
But when I turned, to leave the class for the nurse, I found myself in the driveway at my parents’ house, and I was shoveling snow. The shovel was in my hands. My hands were numb. I was sweating under my jacket and pants. I was a little older now, a teenager. A hard, icy snowball hit me right in the side of the head, near my ear. It really hurt. Really stung. I turned and saw it was my father who’d thrown it. He came over to me, already apologizing but with this smirk on his face that made it pretty obvious he didn’t actually feel bad. He thought it was funny.
Mind you, I was still a light beam, too. I was both things at once. I was in the driveway but I was also in that forest of light beams. I was circling around one of the other light beams, and vaguely I sensed that this was my father, that we were, on some level, sharing this memory. We were engaged in some type of dialogue. We were communicating, but the language was the moment itself.
SZ: Were you aware that he was dead?
44: Not then, no. I wasn’t thinking in those terms. This was just something that was happening to both of us. It didn’t occur to me that I was making any sort of unusual contact with him. I wasn’t thinking about the machine.
SZ: This is also very typical, just so you know. I’m sorry I interrupted. Go on.
44: Well, for a long time, I was just cycling through all these moments, one after the next. I don’t know how much detail you want? I was five years old, in my mother’s bed, and she was tracing shapes on my back with her finger, but when I rolled over, she was much older, in the recliner at her house, and she wanted me to fix her TV. She wanted me to find the movie channels, but I couldn’t seem to work the remote right. The screen went to static, and staring at the static, I thought about the ocean, and just like that, I was at the beach with some friends on a spring break trip. We were tossing the football. I stayed here for a little while. We walked over the dunes to the house we were renting, and I showered, and then we went over to another house, where some girls were throwing a party. One of the girls came over to me, and we started dancing. I spilled some beer on her feet, which she thought was funny, and we wound up in her room.
Everything was so real. So precise. There were these panties and socks spilling out of a red suitcase on the floor, and I couldn’t get the button loose on her jeans. One of her press-on nails was loose in the bed, like a piece of plastic in the bedsheets. We got naked. This was my first time having sex. But when
I pressed myself against this girl, we were touching but there also seemed to be a huge gap between us. We were both sort of husked out, empty. Life on paper. It was like watching yourself make love in a mirror. You know it’s you, but watching yourself, you’re not entirely there.
[NOTE: Subject 44 appears visibly uncomfortable.]
SZ: Are you okay? Do you need to use the bathroom again?
44: God, you weren’t lying about the stomach thing. No, I’m fine. Let’s just get through this.
SZ: You’ll be grateful you did this, [SUBJECT 44], trust me. It’s useful to get it all out while it’s fresh. The experience fades, eventually. Recedes. Your brain prefers there only be one reality, and it will work hard to convince you that your trip in the machine wasn’t real.
44: So [SUBJECT 42]’s was like this, too?
SZ: I can’t discuss that with you. You’ll have to ask her.
44: She said she spent half a month with her first husband.
SZ: As I told you, the experience is slightly different for everyone, though there are clear patterns and trends. There’s a logic to it. So, you were cycling through your life . . .
44: Yes. On and on and on. One second I was with Fisher, talking about orangutans, and the next I’m in bed next to [SUBJECT 42] as she’s reading through her plays. I’m at church with my mother, and she’s crying, in front of everyone, and I’m scooting away from her in the pew, totally embarrassed. Then I’m whipped away, to a car, and I’m with [SUBJECT 42], and we’re sixteen again, and she’s trying to convince me to go on her church’s ski trip. This continued for a long time. I’m tempted to say as long as my life itself. Some scenes I relived two and three times.
How long did you say I was gone—while I was in the machine?
SZ: A fraction of a fraction of a second.
44: Are you sure?
SZ: Time has no bearing in the immaterial world. It doesn’t matter how long you were gone from here. It’s completely irrelevant. Some people feel like they’re gone for a few minutes. Others, an eternity.
44: Well, the more I cycled through all these scenes, the more aware I became that it was happening, that this was a process of some kind. Eventually I was even able to exert a little more control over it. I wound up back on my honeymoon with [SUBJECT 42], and I managed to hold on there for almost two whole days. But the problem was, now that I was more aware, everything felt less alive, less meaningful. Flat, two-dimensional. It was a reflection of my life, not the thing itself. An echo.
SZ: It’s often this building awareness that ends the journey, that brings you back into your body. It’s sort of like lucid dreaming in that way. Once you realize you’re dreaming, it can be harder to remain there. You’re pulled back here. I’m not saying that you were dreaming while in the machine, mind you, though I do think there are some interesting similarities between the dream-state and the afterlife. You might be interested to know that, on average, people exist about one-point-two percent less while asleep. I have confirmed this. We travel in dreams. We prepare ourselves for death.
44: Well, I wasn’t pulled back into my body. That’s not what happened to me—or not exactly. I wasn’t whipped back here.
At some point, I found myself back on the stairs at the restaurant in Shula, the one we talked about on the phone where—
SZ: The dog on fire, yes.
44: Right, and I was there with my father. We had our backs pressed flat to the wall and we were standing side by side. Distantly I knew that I’d been here before, that I’d done this. I’d stood here with my father, maybe a thousand times. And not only that, but I began to understand—or remember maybe—that my father had died, that he was dead, that I was here because I was trying to find him.
Anyway, everything was exactly like it had been. Every detail. Except . . .
SZ: What?
44: All around us there was movement. Shapes. Flutters. Other people! We weren’t alone. I caught little glimpses of them as they passed me on the stairs, going up and down. Faces, fleeting. Streaming bodies. Like smoke sucked through a fan. Blurs of fleshy light. A man with slick black hair came hurrying by me, an angry look on his face. I saw a woman with a dog in her arms. Clara Lennox. It was Clara Lennox! I couldn’t believe it. I stepped down, toward her, and when I did, I sort of—popped loose.
SZ: Popped loose?
44: That’s the only way I can think to describe it. I knew something had changed. When I looked back up the stairs, at my father, he was there and so was I.
SZ: You’d stepped outside yourself. You were no longer viewing this from your own perspective, from your own eyes.
44: Right. Exactly.
SZ: Did you snap back into your body or—?
44: No, I tried to talk to him—to my father. Before, when I’d been in my body, I’d only been able to experience these moments as they’d actually happened. It was like we’d been in two different cars on the highway, moving fast, windows up, and neither one of us was actually driving. The route had been predetermined. We’d been stuck in our own lanes. Locked into a script. But I was free now. I could actually say what I wanted to say, do what I wanted to do. So I called out to him. I asked him if he knew he was dead.
SZ: Did it seem like he could hear you?
44: Maybe. I couldn’t tell. He wouldn’t look at me. Has this ever happened to anyone else?
SZ: Not exactly like this, no. What did you do next?
44: I just—I raised my hand, reached out, and touched him.
SZ: You touched him.
44: On the arm, yes. Just like this. [Note: SUBJECT 44 grabs SZ’s forearm and squeezes hard.] It wasn’t easy to do. There was a resistance to it. It was like a paper doll reaching off the page. And the weird thing is, I knew I wasn’t supposed to even attempt this. I could feel that I was violating some kind of rule. I wasn’t supposed to touch him.
SZ: What happened when you did this? Tell me exactly.
44: There was another pop.
SZ: A pop. Describe it.
44: Yeah, like a string. And he was gone. He disappeared. So did everything else. The forest of light beams was gone, too. The restaurant was gone. All that was left was the stairs. The stairs—and me. I was alone again. I felt as if I’d just been ejected from my life.
The stairs were the same but also different. They kept going in either direction, up and down. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d done something wrong, and now there was only this. Stairs, forever.
I’m waiting for you to tell me this is typical.
SZ: Keep going. What did you do next?
44: Well, it was up or down, wasn’t it? And I chose up. Because who chooses down, right? I climbed and climbed. Up and up and up. I must have climbed for years. I kept going and going. The stairs in the restaurant, they’re winding stairs, if you remember, and without any walls or floors, any points of reference. I couldn’t tell where I was on them. They just kept going up forever. I wasn’t getting anywhere. That’s when I really started to panic. I could remember your machine now, by the way. I knew that’s how I’d wound up here. I started calling out for you. I was desperate for help. This might sound dumb, but I thought if you could just hear me, maybe you’d pull the plug on the machine and bring me back. I worried the machine had really killed me, that this was hell and I was doomed to spend the rest of eternity on those stairs. It was terrifying.
SZ: That’s incredible. If you don’t mind . . . I’d like to . . .
44: What’s it say?
SZ: You’re still in the sixties. But that’s no reason to worry, I assure you.
44: I’m not about to, like, disappear, am I?
SZ: Definitely not. You’re here. You’re here.
44: I can’t believe you have a device that measures how much a person exists.
SZ: Only how much you exist as a physical being. We’re only talking about matte
r. You’ll be fine.
SZ: Do you think— My father always thought it was Clara Lennox who touched him on the stairs, but do you think it’s possible that it was me?
SZ: I don’t know if I can say one way or the other.
44: If it was me, that would be—what? Time travel? I traveled back in time, as a ghost, grabbed my father, and pulled him into a daisy hole? Or maybe it was me who made the daisy hole to begin with by reaching out for him?
SZ: An interesting theory.
44: Well, I had plenty of time for theories. Sitting and theorizing, that’s about all I did. I was a theory. A theory busy theorizing about itself. Climbing seemed pointless so I sat. I was tired. Not physically but spiritually. Just drained. You have to understand, I really did feel like I’d been trapped on the stairs for all eternity. Separated from all the people I love. I was being punished. That’s how it seemed to me. I’d been so desperate to find proof, and now that I had it, the universe was telling me I wasn’t supposed to have been looking for it. That I’d been wrong to want it. Do you ever think we’re not supposed to have it? That to a certain extent we’re supposed to live in the dark?
SZ: I don’t think it’s wrong to want answers.
44: Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But now that I had an answer—not the answer, mind you, but an answer—I didn’t feel any better for it.
SZ: Tell me, [SUBJECT 44], did you ever escape the stairs or—?
44: No, I didn’t, because here’s the thing, here’s what I eventually came to understand. I didn’t need to escape. Because there was nowhere else to escape to. Because everything—you, me, the world, the afterlife—it’s all the same. It’s all stairs. Not stairs, but stairs. What I mean to say is, everything is everything else. The whole is contained in every single fragment, in every piece. Divide the universe in half and it’s still the universe. Divide it a trillion times, and it’s still the universe.
The Afterlives Page 28