Her gaze met mine once more, and for the first time ever I saw tears gleaming in her eyes, her lovely eyes, a pale blue-gray, the ephemeral color sometimes found on the horizon of the ocean, where you can no longer tell where the sky ends and the water begins.
I couldn’t let my final words to her be some joke, some quip that hid the great secret truth of my life. I managed to swallow another mouthful of air and whispered, “I… have always… l-loved you.”
“Stagger,” she whispered back, eyes closing, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Oh, Stagger.”
I closed my eyes as well, unable to spare the strength to keep them open. My heartbeat fluttered in my ears, faint and failing. I hoped I could die at peace now; I’d confessed what I should have revealed ten years before. And yet… and yet there was one thing more. One last secret haunting me as I slipped toward my final rest. My blood turned cold as the guilt of my only betrayal of Infidel’s trust pulsed through me.
I mouthed the words, my voice barely audible, “I… didn’t lose… the m-map. I… s-sold it… to the… the… f- fishmon-” My voice failed. I tried to breathe but couldn’t. My body refused to obey, save for my eyes, which opened once more.
Infidel’s face was inches from my own. Her lips were puckered. I had the distinct impression she was about to kiss me. Then her eyes snapped open. She jerked upward as my final words sank in.
“You did what? ” she asked.
I tried to answer, but it was no use. My body was done for. I couldn’t even close my eyes. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what she said. Her words were lost beneath the roar of waves from a distant, invisible ocean. Behind her, I could see the bright orange faces of lava-pygmies as they emerged from the forest, holding spears tipped with glassy black rock above their heads, preparing to strike. I couldn’t warn her. I couldn’t do anything except drift upward. Whatever essence there may be of a man that is separate from his body had come loose as my heart went silent. I found myself floating, a shapeless, formless thing, a fog composed of memories and broken dreams, cut free from my flesh.
I looked down though non-existent eyes at the scene beneath me. Spears were bouncing off Infidel’s back. She rose with a snarl, yanking the bone-handled knife from my belly. Normally, I love to watch Infidel in combat. She fights like the unholy union of a bobcat and a ballerina, a whirlwind of blades and laughter that traces the landscape around her with long and looping arcs of blood.
But, I paid little mind as she raced toward the first pygmy and delivered a kick that sent him flying above the treetops. Instead, I looked down at the sorry, sodden thing that I’d once thought of as me. I hadn’t made it to fifty, but the mask of wrinkles around my eyes could have belonged to a man twice that age. My cheeks and chin were speckled with scraggly white stubble; I couldn’t grow a decent beard on a bet. My shoulder-length hair was streaked through with gray, and my pony-tail did nothing to hide the scaly bald patch at the back of my skull. I was tall, and in my better days my torso had been shaped like a V, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. Until this moment, I always pictured myself with that body, and had never accepted that the bottom of the V had gotten lost beneath an O, a big, oval jug of jiggling fat that must inevitably attach itself to a man who loved his liquor as much as I did.
With my eyeless vision, I could see the truth of who I’d been: a fat, half-bald old drunk who’d been vain enough to fantasize that a woman whom the gods must surely envy might one day love him.
As my consciousness expanded, ever wider, ever thinner, I was dimly aware that I’d miss that man.
Then, I had no awareness at all.
Or, more accurately, I had awareness, but no will, no ability to guide my perceptions or ponder the scenes I saw. I was spread through all things. I was present in the dark depths of the ocean, floating beside hideous fish with lantern eyes and jaws like bear-traps. I was present in the jungle, slithering among the branches crawling with snakes and toads and beetles, all in rainbow hues brighter than gemstones. I was present in the bars of Commonground, where battle-weary veterans of the pirate wars stumbled along the uneven boardwalks as whores called out for their company. I could feel all the lust and loneliness of their moments, all the sorrowful joy that spills into the universe when two strangers touch in intimacy.
And, far, far above the squalid city, I was present in the clouds, looking out upon a night sky full of glittering diamonds, keenly aware of every point of light. The sky shimmered with distant suns and unseen planets, and I could hear the murmur of countless voices, the indecipherable echoes of life on worlds too numerous to number. What was left of my mind shrugged and surrendered, unable to absorb the infinite majesty of a creation in which my life had been of no consequence at all.
It was into this vastness that I would disappear. The final spark of my consciousness calmly dissipated. Like a stream of stinking urine spreading into the ocean, I was absorbed once more into the Great Incomprehensible All.
Then, blood pulsed within my non-existent heart.
There was another pulse, then another, and I began to feel as if I once more had veins and arteries, as if I once more had lungs. The atoms of my awareness raced back from the ocean, from the forest, from the sky, coalescing into a specter above my still very dead corpse. Where I’d been only a formless mass of thought, I could now look down at ghostly fingers, wraith-like toes, and a phantom wang. I was hanging naked above the shell of my body. I reached down to touch it, but my ghost hands found no purchase in the dead flesh. Yet, I was definitely me again. Something had halted the dispersal of my soul.
Around my body, the ground was wet with blood. Far more blood, I knew, than had ever pumped through my heart. I quickly spotted the severed limbs and mangled torsos of half a dozen pygmies. I felt a shiver of guilt that I’d brought this fate upon them. I spun around, searching for Infidel.
She looked as if she’d been doused with buckets of tomato juice. She had a pygmy dangling in her grasp, a chief judging from his feathered head-dress. She had my bone-handled knife pressed against his throat.
“Call them off!” she growled, as more pygmies emerged from the trees. “Just leave us alone and no one else gets hurt!”
The chief responded by spitting in her eye. Two seconds later, his head was separated from his shoulders.
As his blood flowed across the bone-handled knife, life flowed back into me. I inhaled, my ghost lungs filling, and shouted, “Infidel!”
She didn’t react. She was too lost in her anger to hear me as she charged the newest round of warriors, a dozen spearmen clustered in a frightened clump at the edge of the clearing.
I grabbed at her arm as she raced past me. My fingers passed right through her skin.
“Infidel!” I screamed again.
She didn’t even blink as she crashed into the wall of spears, splintering them. The wide-eyed pygmies turned in unison to flee. She gave chase for only a yard or so, then, either in frustration or as a warning, she punched the nearest tree, splintering the trunk.
The tree groaned, then toppled, as Infidel lowered into a half crouch and scanned the area, her eyes as intense as a cat searching a bush for a bird.
Infidel remained alert for several minutes as her panting breath returned to normal. At last, she relaxed, straightening up. The pygmies had taken the hint. She twisted her head in a slow arc, her bones popping as the tension in her neck and shoulders slackened. Her lips parted slightly as she took a deep breath. Looking at my body, her shoulders sagged.
She walked toward my corpse, her arms limp at her sides, my bone-handled knife barely dangling in her grasp. When she reached my remains, she stared down, breathing slowly. The music of frogs and insects began to hum and strum as the violence of the moment before was swept away by the unceasing flow of time.
She shoved my knife into her broad leather belt and knelt before my body. Placing her arms beneath my knees and shoulders, she lifted me. I twisted my ghostly form to occupy the space of my corpse, trying to feel her hands upon my dead flesh, to no avail. I could no more grasp my body than I could grasp the wind.
She carried my cadaver into the calm end of the pool, walking ever deeper until I was submerged. She ducked her whole body beneath the water. I didn’t know what she was doing. I was mystified, unable to read the blank mask of her face and eyes. She bobbed back above water to breathe. The blood from the battle washed from her face. As the water carried off the gore that caked my grandfather’s knife, my ghostly body faded from my sight. I was no longer dispersing into nothingness, or allness, but was instead simply invisible, intangible, a memory of a man haunting the woman he once loved, his soul somehow bound to the blade that had killed him.
