by Fynn Perry
“Why now? Why you?” sighed a voice.
The words seemed to dance in her head.
“Just when I’d met you.” More sighed words, this time with an unmistakable cadence. “Just when I thought my life was starting, it ended.”
Even through the resigned tone, the voice was familiar, beautiful––soft as silk despite the desperation. It was his voice. Just thinking of his name caused a shiver to race over her, and she suddenly became aware that her body was soaked in sweat. It was uncomfortably real. Was his voice real? She slowly opened her eyes, exposing them to the full intensity of the orange light. It was the orange of a sunset, and Jennifer loved sunsets––the light seemed to make all other colors more vibrant and saturated. But this orange emanated from something as amazing as it was unsettling. John was sitting before her, but it wasn’t the John she knew. The figure had no natural color, no depth, but was immaculate in every detail, right down to the clothes he had been wearing the last time she had seen him.
Her first instinct was to recoil her legs and shrink against the headboard in horror. Minutes passed as she just stared at him, transfixed, involuntarily taking in everything before her. His eyes were like fiery wells and when he blinked, he had the same long lashes as before. The lashes she had imagined other girls swooning over, and before them, his aunts when he was a just a boy.
What she saw had initially frightened her, but the longer she looked at him, the more the vision became compelling, even beautiful. She tried to say something, her desperation to understand now overcoming her fear. There was a gasping sound, and then Jennifer’s voice re-emerged from her dry throat. “John?” she croaked.
“My God, you can see me?” he said in a startled tone.
“Yes!” she confided, equally startled. Her childhood memory of seeing her grandmother on the day she died flashed into her mind. She had never understood what she had seen, but neither had she been afraid of it. But now, her thoughts, like gear-cogs beginning to mesh, made the connection: she had seen the same glow around her grandmother.
He moved his hand toward hers. She had longed for his touch, but never had she imagined it like this. There was no warmth, texture, or substance to his hand. In fact, it was like there was nothing there at all. She just felt a chill, and it made her hand tremble.
“I… I thought this was all a dream at first,” he stammered. “I saw my own operation like one of those near-death experiences some people claim to have had. But then I changed into this, and with everything I’ve seen, I’m starting to think it’s all too complex, too real, too perfectly accurate for it to be some kind of hallucination.”
She looked up at his face, her eyes watering. “Oh my God, John! I think you’ve passed into the afterlife. I saw it happen to someone I know once before and didn’t understand…but I get it now. All these years of doubting myself! I knew I saw her! God, why did I have to find out this way?”
“What do you mean?”
Seeing his confusion, she recounted her childhood memory of witnessing her grandmother’s spirit waving to her. “She looked like you on the …” Her eyes started to water. “On the day she died, John. She must have wanted to say good-bye.” A sudden realization hit her, “Oh my God, John—are you saying good-bye to me?”
“But I’m not dead, Jen. My body is alive but in a coma. Somehow, my soul has become separated from it.” He related how he’d seen other spirits and his encounter with the spirit of the old man. He paused a moment to let Jennifer take it all in. “When I told him about my body being in a coma, he said I was as good as dead; otherwise, I wouldn’t be like this. But he could be wrong, Jen. Maybe there is a way I can rejoin my body that he doesn’t know about!”
“Of course, you can—people have recovered from comas!” she gushed, her voice still husky. “And you’re not alone in this, John. Look, somehow we are still together.”
He seemed to brighten, uplifted by her optimism. “I was thinking maybe I have to do something while I’m like this, Jen—something good, to earn my way back. Maybe this wasn’t a random attack; maybe there’s more to it and I need to find out what that is.”
“But what would drive someone to do something so vicious and out in the open? Maybe he was high or deranged….” Jennifer’s voice faded when she noticed the puncture through his shirt at the level of his lower abdomen. “Oh my God, John, is that the knife wound? Does it hurt?”
“I don’t feel anything there. It’s like it’s healed. It’s just part of this image of me,” John replied.
Jennifer shrugged, his answer doing little to aid her comprehension of what he had become. “What do you remember of the attack?” she asked.
“I remember we were going to kiss,” he answered softly, the light from his eyes now subdued to a smoldering glow. “Then came the sudden blow, sending you flying.” His eyes seemed to catch fire with anger as he continued. “Then, the pain. Christ! The pain was so intense and I was falling to the ground.” His tone turned sympathetic. “I saw you lying motionless on the ground, rain soaking your hair. Then came the flashing lights and the crowd of onlookers, then darkness. The next thing I remember is seeing my body on the operating table with my stomach cut open. I tried to shout, but I had no voice, and nobody could see or hear me. I had the weirdest sense of no longer belonging to the living.
“Then something happened so incredible I can hardly explain it, Jen. I was suddenly able to see everything happening on Earth at once. And I mean everything. It was like I was everywhere and anywhere, seeing every action and hearing every conversation. I saw you lying on a gurney, and I knew your prognosis was good. Then, on top of all this mind-blowing information, I suddenly became aware of the consequence of every action, every decision taking place on the planet––like a complex web of cause and effect. Then, among all the voices, I could hear a call for me to move on. It became louder and louder as more and more voices joined in.”
“Move on to where, John?” Jennifer asked, terrified.
“I don’t know.” John shrugged. “But I felt my mind was about to explode. It took all my will to resist the call, and when I finally did, all that information vanished and I was transformed into this.”
John went on to tell Jennifer about the other spirits he had seen through the window in the hospital’s stairwell, among the living in the car park. “They looked like regular people of different ages. But the one thing they all had in common was that they looked lost and confused, just like me. Some of them followed the living—I’m guessing they were relatives. Others just stood around waiting. In the distance I saw the glow of other spirits in buses, cars, and taxis. It means there’s a whole additional world…”
John stopped as he looked at Jennifer.
Stress and confusion had kept her sadness in check until this point, but his last words got through to her and she began to face what was becoming a harsh reality––John didn’t want to accept it, but he was part of another world, a world of the dead, or the as-good-as dead. Would she now have to spend the rest of her life seeing him this way, being constantly reminded of what they could have been together? For one dark moment, she thought of taking her own life to be with him, and then, as if a barrier had been taken down, emotions flooded out of her and she burst out crying.
A middle-aged nurse on her rounds looked into Jennifer’s bay and observed her sitting upright in bed and crying while seemingly talking to herself.
Jennifer’s bed complained a little as the heavy-set nurse sat next to her. She smiled warmly and put one of her thick arms around Jennifer. “OK, take it easy,” she comforted. “You need to lie down. Rest in the first forty-eight hours is critical to your recovery, so I’m going to bring you something to help you sleep. I’ll be right back.”
Jennifer nodded in response to the words, but her eyes were on John the entire time. She waited for the nurse to be out of earshot before she asked fearfully, “What if you stay like this, John?”
“You mean watching you go ahead with your lif
e, meeting someone new, eventually having a family . . . and me seeing everything I’m missing out on? No, wait . . . I can’t even do that because you’ll see me watching you. That would be weird.”
“And creepy,” she added, trying to hold back fresh tears.
The nurse returned before Jennifer could say anything more. She was given a pill to swallow and the woman sat with her, waiting for it to take effect. Jennifer could see John in the corner of her eye and turned to look at him.
The nurse frowned. “Don’t fight it,” she said. “Sleep is the best medicine for you now. I’ll be looking in on you just to make sure you’re fine.”
But Jennifer couldn’t help but look because John had started to move around excitedly.
“I didn’t show you all the cool things, I can do now,” John said, his tone brightening as he made his hand disappear into the wall, then his arm, and finally the rest of his body.
She waited in anticipation for him to reappear, ignoring the nurse’s concerns over her sudden interest in what seemed to be a plain wall. But just as he re-emerged from the wall, with that same roguish grin that she adored, her eyes closed.
John thought about lying down and sleeping on the floor next to Jennifer’s bed, just to be close to her, but he couldn’t trust himself not to sink through it. It was that feeling of sinking that had roused him from his previous sleep in the waiting area of the ICU. When he awoke, his father and Donovan had gone and, according to the clock on the wall, only an hour had passed. He had felt less than fully regenerated—just as he would have done after so short a nap in the real world. He had gone to see Jennifer all the same, but now he was in desperate need of more rest. He decided to get to the basement as quickly as he could. At least there, if he sank through the floor, the earth would only be a few inches beneath to support him. He would see her again in the morning. Perhaps her father would know something more about the attack, he thought, recalling her father’s seemingly good relationship with the detective.
Fifteen minutes later, John was back in the same basement storeroom where he had met the old man, except the spirit was nowhere to be seen. His risk in taking the elevator had paid off; he had managed to summon the several seconds of intense concentration required not to fall through the floor and saved himself a slow walk down six flights of stairs. He didn’t know what would have happened to him if he’d fallen through an open elevator shaft, but he figured it wouldn’t have been good.
He lay resting on the storeroom floor, confident that the dirt below it would support him should he start to sink through the slab while asleep. He wondered if all coma patients went through what he was going through and why, as Jennifer had pointed out, did only some of them recover? How did they rejoin their bodies and return to the living? What was their secret? Did they pass some sort of test? He was far from religious, but something from his strict Catholic school education in Dublin had obviously stuck with him as he couldn’t shake his previous feeling that, to reverse all this, he would have to do something good. Something that would show a higher power that he was worthy of returning to the living. He figured the attack must be somehow connected. It was, after all, what had thrown him into this nightmare. Perhaps if he found the killer, the motive, he would get a clue as to what he should do. John shook his head slightly and wondered briefly if he was going mad. As incredible as his theory sounded, it was no more incredible than what he was experiencing, and he was desperate to try something—anything. Before drifting off, his final devastating thought was that he might never again be close to Jennifer.
Four
The next morning, Jennifer was woken by what seemed to be bursts of orange light passing through her eyelids. Nervously, she opened them. She saw nothing more than sunlight flashing through gaps between the vertical blinds of her hospital room window as they gently swayed, like corn in a field, in the air blown in from the ventilation grille above. She saw around her plain white walls and utilitarian furniture. Everything looked sterile, cold, anonymous. There was no faint orange glow lurking. This was reality, and it comforted her. She convinced herself that she must have dreamt seeing John.
She felt a soft hand on the side of her head and flinched. Cautiously rolling over, she was relieved to see her parents. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” she rasped.
“Thank God! You can see and talk!” her mother said before shooting her father a brief, accusatory stare that said the entire situation was all his fault.
He deftly avoided the scowl and leaned in; she could see his expression change from initial relief to one of concern. “I know you’re exhausted, Pumpkin, but we have to try to identify the man who attacked you and John as fast as possible. The longer we leave it, the less you will remember. Do you recall what happened?’
“Typical lawyer! Why don’t you just wheel her out in her bed now to the station, for God’s sake!” her mother muttered while smiling at Jennifer and continuing to stroke her forehead.
Jennifer tensed and shook her head vigorously and her mother shot her father a longer stare, which this time hit home. He softened his tone. “Relax, sweetie, it won’t be a line-up, you will just have some mugshots to look at.”
Jennifer wasn’t relieved. Her stomach tightened. She knew the assailant’s face was somewhere buried away in her mind, along with all the horrific details of the attack. Seeing it again would unleash all the fear and trauma she’d experienced. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She would have to force herself to take part in the police investigation.
Her mother must have sensed her anxiety, because she dived in to rescue her with good news. “What your father didn’t tell you is that you can leave the hospital today,” she announced.
Jennifer nodded. It wasn’t the good news she had hoped for. “What about John?”
Her parents looked at each other for a moment. She felt her mother’s hand on her own as she softly said, “He’s still in a coma. The doctors can’t say when he will come out of it. But the fact that he’s in one means his body can focus all of its energy on survival.”
Her mother carried on reciting more of what she had heard the doctor say, but Jennifer wasn’t listening. Confirmation that John was still in a coma was all that she needed. She stared blankly, past her parents, toward the glass partition and door to her room, barely registering the movement in the corridor or the rooms beyond it. Her dream of John visiting her last night as a glowing orange spirit seemed so real, so vivid.
In the background, she heard the escalation of yet another one of her parents’ arguments. It distracted her just long enough for her eyes to focus and hold her gaze on a group of people gathered round the bed of a patient in the room opposite. A family visiting, she guessed. Nothing unusual about that except…She rubbed her eyes because, unnervingly, she could see the tiniest hint of a faint yet familiar orange glow, as though one of the people standing over the bed had a silhouette. She gasped as the silhouette became wider and brighter. Then, out of the thick of the group, a glowing orange head and torso stepped out. The head turned toward Jennifer. She could just make out the facial features: they were not menacing or monstrous—they were elderly and kind. The man didn’t seem to notice Jennifer, who was now frozen in shock, staring at him.
The arguing between her parents stopped. They looked at her, and then at each other. She was unresponsive to their questions. Her father placed his hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. “Jennifer, what’s the matter?”
“Can’t you see him?” Jennifer whispered back in shock.
Her parents turned to look in the direction in which she was staring and even moved, blocking her view, but Jennifer didn’t care. She already knew they wouldn’t see the spirit. She rolled onto her back and shifted her gaze toward the ceiling, barely registering her parents’ voices. Her doubts of seeing John as a spirit last night had just died.
Jennifer slowly realized that her view of the ceiling had become crowded with blurred images of three faces—the worried faces of her parents and
a nurse who she recognized from the night before. The images gradually sharpened into focus. They will sedate me again if I don’t appear normal, and I might never get out of this place, or worse, I might get transferred to a psych ward. God knows I’ve given them reason to do that.
“Jennifer?” she heard the nurse say calmly as a thick finger moved in front of her eyes and Jennifer accurately tracked it. “I’ll just get the doctor to check her over. Just to make sure.”
Jennifer looked at the nurse and smiled. “It’s OK. I just had another memory of the accident. I’m OK! Really! I don’t need anything,” she insisted.
Twenty minutes later, an attractive, middle-aged man in a white coat arrived to interrupt her parents’ chatter at the end of her bed. She recognized the Italian-accented voice she had heard the evening before. Dr. Di Luca, it turned out, was bearded, wore stylish glasses, and had Mediterranean-style olive skin. His hair was mostly gray––normally a welcome indication of experience and wisdom, but right now she didn’t want his good advice or his prognosis—all she wanted was for him to discharge her.
“Jennifer Miller,” he said, looking at his notes and with the same warmth as before. “I’m glad to say that you’re through the worst of it. You lost consciousness from a concussion caused by a head injury. You came out of it without all your faculties—at first.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Forgive me. I will explain in simpler terms,” he said, smiling. “You couldn’t see or hear at first, as you know. Now you can do both, and your speech is coherent. Nightmares related to the attack are unfortunately normal. As are flashbacks. You may experience repeated, sudden states of shock, like the one Nurse Bailey just informed me about. On the other hand, headaches and dizziness are not a normal part of recovery from concussion. If they occur again, come back and see me for tests,” he cautioned. He turned to nod at Jennifer’s parents. “She needs to be at home, in familiar surroundings. No mental strain, so no school for a few weeks.”