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
