John shook his head and struggled again to release his feet. He certainly didn’t want to be stuck in this spirit form forever, so he had to do something to start to re-orient himself. The only thing that seemed to make any sense at all to him was to find and stay with his physical body. Being close to it, he figured, might somehow allow him to wake up. His thoughts turned to Jennifer, the girl he’d met up with on the night of the stabbing and who he’d swiftly fallen for in a big way. He berated himself for not even considering her up until now. He had to see her. What if she had needed surgery? What if she was somehow experiencing the same things as he was? He dismissed the last thought as idiotic. Her injuries were far less serious than his. Her fall had knocked her out, but the knife had come only at him and he had remained conscious just long enough to see that no further harm would come to her until the paramedics arrived.
“Let me help you,” the man said, seeing John’s frustrated attempts to free himself. “Listen carefully. Learn to interact with your surroundings. Dirt and anything natural will support you because at the cellular level it’s made of the same pure stuff we are, but anything human-made is another matter. So right now, it is the dirt below the concrete floor that is supporting you. Don't ask me why it is this way. It's something to do with the balance of energy on earth. Now, pay attention. Use your will to control the energy in your foot so that it can release itself.” He motioned with his own foot, and allowed it to sink a few centimeters into the floor before it popped out again. “At first it takes a lot of focus just to touch a surface without slipping through it, let alone to sit or walk on one.” The old man said this so matter-of-factly, John thought it must have been a long time since the weirdness of this parallel reality had blown his mind. Now the old man just took it for granted.
John tried again, this time channeling all his thoughts into willing his foot to move. It started to shift, slowly. Like his hand had previously, it emerged from the storeroom’s floor with particles seeming to partially coat it. Afterward, the surface snapped back, with the same dissipating ripple as before. He lowered his foot hard, expecting to make contact with the surface, to push against the floor and pull his other foot out. Instead, it shot through, returning his foot to the same sunken level as before.
"Concentrate and imagine interacting with the surface you want to push against, then when you want to take, say, your foot off that surface, imagine breaking those interactions.”
John tried again, this time imagining the atoms in the sidewalk held together by bonds of energy. He could picture it well, thanks in no small part to his physics classes with fat Mr. Jeffries back in Dublin. The teacher’s remarkable stealth in slamming down a two-foot, Perspex ruler on the desk of anyone inattentive had kept his pupils focused.
Next, John imagined the energy buzzing through his feet, pushing against the energy holding the millions of atoms together in the surface of the floor. Then it happened: he felt a sensation of resistance, which he pushed against until he was standing on the floor.
He nodded at the spirit of the old man in cautious appreciation, and then, as he lost concentration, he dropped nearly a whole inch into the floor. Re-focusing, he pushed himself back up to ground level, feet now contacting firmly with the floor surface.
“Don’t worry about walls, you’ll pass through them like you did through the floors when you landed here! In fact, the less you think about going through them, the easier you’ll find it.” The old man encouraged.
John walked toward the storeroom door. It was a less-than-graceful journey as he seemed to disappear into invisible holes that appeared whenever he lost focus. He stopped to turn around to thank the old man.
“Second floor,” the old man said before John could say anything.
John look confused.
“You’re not the first newbie to drop in on me,” the old man smiled. “The operating theaters are above us and, with your knife wound, I figured that’s where you must have come from. The ICU is on the same floor, and I expect that’s where your body is now, after the surgery. We’re in the basement, but I’d take the stairs if I were you. The elevator might be a bit advanced at this stage. You don’t want to fall down the elevator shaft.”
John raised his hand in thanks and turned back toward the closed door.
“Straight through without thinking, remember!” the old man called out.
John did as he’d advised and immediately found himself in a long and empty corridor. As he walked along it looking for an exit into the stairwell, someone in a janitorial uniform crossed the corridor in front of him, walking across from one room to another, completely unaware of John’s presence. He felt unnerved by being able to see people without them seeing him. Almost like a superpower, he thought.
He found the door to the stairs, passed through it, and started his ascent, which he figured would be a time-consuming exercise of trial and error.
Three
In her concussed state, Jennifer Miller was unaware of the intense hammering noise coming from the coils of the MRI scanner at Queens
