by Liam Card
Sixty-one years, two months, fourteen days, nine hours, and ten point seventy-eight seconds.
She sent a requisition to the Bookkeeper for information surrounding the current status and whereabouts of her sister. The Bookkeeper replied, “Status: Required Perspective Achieved. Location: What’s Next, as per her decision.”
She vibrated with such force that locals took shelter. One local suggested the blast might have set off an earthquake or tremor. Many others agreed.
“Safia, what was that? How did you do that?”
“I feel like I could explode. Have you not felt like that?”
“Once, but perspective took over. Just try to let it pass.”
“I can’t.”
“Use your experiences from the Line. You’ve felt this level of hurt before.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “That is the problem. The stories in the Line, they all just compounded.”
She intercepted a thought projection from another young suicide bomber only a few cities away, about to carry out his misguided orders. She asked me to take her there to prevent it.
But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
“Take me there!” she demanded.
“Why?”
“You’re my teacher!”
“It’s already too late,” I said, and we saw the images and heard the muffled screams. Her form grew swollen with frustration, and the vibrations that followed set off another shaking of the earth.
“There was nothing you could have done,” I said. “We’re incapable. You need to stop vibrating like that.”
“That makes no sense,” she said, and I suggested that wasn’t the kind of statement a ghost should be making. “If I am chained to this fate, should I not attempt to change things?”
“Humanity has to grow at its own pace,” I said. “You know that.”
“Let’s speed it up.”
“Safia, I know this is frustrating, but I need to calm you before you vibrate like that again. Listen, there’s nothing we can do to prevent horrible acts, and chasing them to witness the suffering does you no good. Let’s go to a waterfall or check out the pyramids. What do you say?”
“I was tricked,” she said, and sent me the image of a fox, standing on his hind legs, smoking a cigar. The fox wore white T-shirt that read, “Bookkeeper.”
I sent her back a few hundred question marks.
She sent me an image of herself bound and handcuffed to a block of concrete under thirty feet of water. For one reason or another, the Post-Death Line had failed to provide the context required to be a ghost, and I uploaded a form to the Bookkeeper asking him what had gone wrong but got nothing in return.
“If it makes you feel better, I made the wrong choice as well, but we’re here now, together. Let me show you some neat things.”
She sent me a small video clip of the words “neat things” being rigged with explosives and obliterated.
Fair enough.
When I asked if she wanted to talk, she shared the argument she had with her mother, prior to the attack.
“I refuse to go alone,” she said.
“Safia, I need your sister’s help here, today,” said her mother.
“If you want more supplies, I need more hands,” she said.
“Not this time. You must go alone and do your part. As much as you can carry and come straight home.”
“Do you really expect me to carry enough? With these arms?” she said. And then Safia outstretched her thin arms in an attempt to reveal their inadequacy. Her mother threw up arms of her own. Up, up into the air, and ordered Haadiya to accompany Safia, after all. The mother said, “Be a good girl along the way.”
And her little sister was a good girl along the way. She was a good girl while they waited their turn to reach the supply truck. While the people yelled.
And pushed.
While arms were reaching and people were sweating.
Eventually, Safia made it to the front and grabbed supply bag after supply bag, stacking them on top of her sister’s outstretched arms. Enough bags to cover up her face and permanent fixture of a smile. Enough bags to mute her laugher.
Safia giggled.
She had successfully loaded down her mule of a little sister and reached back for two more bags for herself.
“Come now, Haadiya,” she said. “Let’s see if you can keep up with me.”
Then she turned and saw the handsome teenage boy run into the crowd and loudly scream. Heartbeats froze and goose bumps formed on everyone in attendance. Fear removed screams from their open mouths, and then came the blast. Hot air pushed metal quickly through the crowd.
And then Safia was all the way back to the beginning, telling her mother she refused to go to the distribution site without her sister. I watched the scene play out in its entirety the 410 times she ordered it to.
Hovering beside her. Doing my best to help. Doing my worst to do so.
By this time the square had filled with people. The dead were dragged into rows, and a whole lot of pictures were taken of them. An American correspondent spoke in front of a camera and tried to recap the tragic incident to the world but thought more about the amount of grit in the wind that day and what it was doing to her face and hair. That if some of the grit got into her mouth would it damage her enamel? It was at this point that I saw Safia project her desire for a much-required change in scenery.
“Would you like me to teach you how to travel now?” I suggested.
She accepted.
• • •
We made it in time to see the sun set at Rick’s Cafe in Jamaica and just hung there until it was seconds from over. We hovered above the honeymooners, vacationers, and locals who never grew tired of taking in the awe-inspiring sunset. Even the heavily muscled high divers couldn’t compete with Mother Nature’s feature presentation. The sun touched the ocean and began its transformation into a blood orange.
Safia, still enraged, was unarmed against its beauty, and for a moment was at ease. “Pretty,” she said.
“I thought you’d like it.” The sun disappeared into the vast ocean, and night fell on Rick’s Cafe.
“I was tricked,” said Safia, and she uploaded to me her interaction with the Bookkeeper. I watched it play out.
“I see you asked if your sister was alive,” I said. “That was true at the time of the question. She was indeed alive.”
“Yes, she was alive, but she was in the process of dying.”
“The Bookkeeper answered your question.”
“My sister’s condition at the time of the question was critically important to my decision-making.”
“Then perhaps you should have crafted your question differently,” I said and shared with her a dozen variances of the question that might have surfaced the response she was looking for.
“I should be in What’s Next with my sister. I should be rid of this disgusting planet.”
“There are many wonderful things to see. You’ll have the time of your afterlife. I’ll see to it, personally.”
But she identified the shred of doubt that underscored my sentiment and sent me back the image of a donkey braying wildly. The brand on the donkey’s ass read, “Luke.” I sent her back a smile. She sent me back a horribly disfigured smile, as if it had been badly burned in a fire.
“Safia, I don’t think you’re supposed to be this angry.”
“I have never been so angry,” she said, and the earth shook. Bits of rock crumbled from the cliffs at Rick’s Cafe. Everyone fled the scene. Rob hadn’t taught me to make the earth shake, and for Safia, this was becoming commonplace.
“How do you do that? You have to show me.”
“I will not be fine here, Luke,” she said and sent me a picture of the ocean labelled, “tears.” At the bottom of the ocean was an ivory envelope with my name on it. I
nside it was a card. The card read, “I promise.”
She promised that if the Bookkeeper was going to bind her to Earth for a decision made with misinformation, she was going to do more than float around. She promised that she was going to make grand changes to the world, no matter what it took.
Every amount of energy in my spiritual composition believed her.
Every bit of me knew that my afterlife was in for a dramatic change.
7
Twenty-four hours later, Safia reached out to me and provided the coordinates of her location. It was the surface of the moon. I sent her back a pencil-drawn man scratching his head. The text read “Is that even possible?” She sent me back a passport with the projection path on how to access the moon.
Off to the moon I went.
We hovered over the Sea of Tranquility, above the peaks of the surrounding lunar mountains, looking down on the stunning blue marble that is Earth.
“I had no idea we could travel to the moon,” I said. “This is an incredible view.”
“Why didn’t you think we could travel here?”
“In the handbook it says that we are tied to Earth,” I said. “I guess the moon somehow qualifies.”
“You just didn’t think to try,” she said.
“I guess not.”
Safia glowed and vibrated with excitement to my response. She shook the Sea of Tranquility, and a section of surrounding mountain crumb-led, broke up, and thundered down into the full depth of the crater.
“I believe we are capable of a lot more than the Handbook tells us,” she said. I floated away to hover over the Sea of Crises. She promptly followed.
“What’s the matter?”
“You shouldn’t be talking this way.”
“What way should I be talking?”
“I’d rather not be on the moon, to be honest. It feels like we’re out of bounds,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
She sent me a stop sign. I sent back the stop sign riddled with bullet holes.
“If you leave, I will call you back, and if you recall the Rules of Mentorship, that is exactly what you will have to do,” she said and sent me a Golden Retriever with its tail between its legs. The Retriever then lay down beside its water bowl, resting its head on its paws. The name on the dog’s collar read, “Luke.”
“It bothers me that you make everything shake. The Earth and the Moon and make things crumble and break apart.”
“Why does that bother you?”
“And the things you say bother me as well. I need to get you cooled down,” I said and sent her video clips of professional athletes sitting down into tubs of ice to speed the recovery of their aching muscles. She moved closer to me.
I felt warmth.
That was noteworthy, because I hadn’t felt any kind of temperature since I had returned as a ghost. But I felt warmth with her hovering that close to me. Later on, I would learn that this was due to her unique vibration pattern. The same pattern that made the earth shake and would soon end lives.
“What do you see when you look down on Earth, Luke?”
“I see a miracle.”
“Continue.”
“I see a thing of wonder, where creation and life exists,” I said. Immediately, I second-guessed my response. I mean, after having lived the lives of many high scholars, I should have come up with something more eloquent than that. More poetic. Safia assured me that my response wasn’t being adjudicated.
“What do you see?” I said.
“I see a place of destruction and death. I see an entirely miserable place where somehow, over a long period of time, the wrong species managed to take control of the planet, poison it, abuse it, and butcher itself in the process. All of this to a degree that warrants severe interference of some kind.”
For the first time in my afterlife, I was experiencing fear. Safia could sense it. It was written all over my vibrational composition, but Safia forged ahead with her thoughts.
“My sister and I died in a square because someone else thought it was their duty and responsibility to interfere with the greatest gift on Earth: life.”
“I understand.”
“Luke, you were a mother in the Post-Death Line. Do you think mothers risk their lives in childbirth, suffer through the delivery of that child, then care for that child with all of their energy and resources, just to see that child ripped apart by bullets or the blade of a machete? Or raped? Tortured or beaten? Blown apart by a bomb? Do you think mothers go to all that trouble to have it end like that?”
“I experienced the Line, Safia. I understand all of this.”
“Forget the Line. The Line did nothing but amplify my anger. And the Line is not my point.”
“I’m terribly unclear as to your point.”
“My point is this: What if I could prevent it?”
“Prevent what?”
“Murder. Violent crimes. What if I could stop it?”
“We can’t interfere. You know the rules.”
“What if we can?”
“We can’t.”
“Before travelling to the Moon, you would have been convinced that hovering here was not possible. Am I wrong there?”
Yes, she had me on that point.
“Luke, we’ve only been told we can’t, but I did something recently that has me wondering,” she said and uploaded to me an encounter from only a few hours before our conversation on the surface of the moon.
Safia had followed the fear projections of a young woman in Miami, Florida, who, upon walking home from the gym, had refused the advances of a man many years her senior. This guy had pulled up beside her in a complete shitbox of a 1984 Caprice Classic. Both the condition of the car and the condition of the man suggested that they had seen a hard go of it in the world.
Both required maintenance.
The man called out to her a number of times, asking her name and where she was headed. The young girl ignored him, as a young girl would in this situation. In so many words, the man suggested that she shouldn’t wear tight clothing if she didn’t want the attention. The young woman responded that walking home from the gym in gym clothing wasn’t inappropriate and that she wasn’t asking for anything at all, except to walk home without being interrupted.
“So, you’re going home,” said the man.
“Maybe not,” said the woman. “Maybe I take a detour by the police station and report you.”
The man stated very clearly that he knew she wanted it. The woman disagreed. He said she was giving off signals, and she promptly disagreed again. He said her mouth was saying no but her ass was saying yes, and she picked up her pace a little as her heart rate doubled. Her eardrums pounded due to increased blood pressure. Tears hung from the bottom lids of her eyes. She did her best to remain strong and not to look half as frightened as she was. She prayed to God that the man would just go away. If he did, she would go to church more, and it would be a sign from Jesus that he was looking after her.
After a few more failed attempts to aggressively woo her into his Caprice Classic, the man hurled a slew of insults her direction and finally said farewell. He slowed his car down to a crawl, and the young woman walked on, thinking she was now in the clear. Her eyeballs flicked up to the sky, and she thanked God for what had transpired. She decided, then and there, that Jesus was real and that she would cancel the coffee with her friend Wendy on Sunday morning and would go to church instead, just as she had promised.
This event had to happen, she thought.
This is the sign I’ve been looking for, she thought.
Things are looking up, she thought.
That was until she heard the roar of the engine and was struck by the vehicle from behind. The back of her head bent the metal of the hood. Her broken body flew off the cracked windshield and onto the patch of manicured grass lining the sidewalk. A
sprinkler system set up to water the flawless lawn did its best to wash the blood from her face. Then, by its nature, it left to fulfill its duty elsewhere. However, it would return, and return again.
The man introduced the pedal to the floor mat, and the shitbox sped off.
What’s one more dent? he thought.
What’s more cracks in the windshield? he thought.
I’m long gone, and in the clear, he thought.
Safia’s form became swollen with rage, the earth began to shake so hard the sidewalk cracked, and some of the young woman’s blood found its way into those fresh nooks and crannies in the cement. Safia attempted to connect with the young girl but was unable to. There were no more thought projections to be shared. She was gone.
Safia boiled.
In attempting to understand where the assailant was headed, Safia reconnected with him. However, as soon as the connection was made, his body fell limp and his face hit the steering wheel. He slumped into the seat of the Caprice Classic, bleeding profusely from his eyes, ears, and nose. The speeding car eventually came to a stop on account of a light standard.
Sparks met gasoline, and the car exploded.
Dead as a doornail, as they say, making all kinds of a mess from his face as the old velour seat soaked that goop up as best as it could.
He just lay there, nothing more than a fuel source for the oncoming flames.
Safia stopped the upload. “Luke, this sounds crazy, but I believe that when I focused my energy his direction in an attempt to connect with his thoughts, enraged as I was, I inadvertently caused a massive brain aneurysm or hemorrhage of some kind due to my vibration pattern.”
“You believe you killed him.”
“From the evidence put before you, what is your conclusion?”