Chapter 1: New Arrival
I’m standing on a street I don’t know, in a town I’ve never seen.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here.
“Hey. You alright?”
The voice doesn’t startle me. I barely react at all.
“I don’t know.”
The man who is now standing in front of me doesn’t seem to want to hurt me. There’s a sympathetic smile on his face as he looks at me, taking all of me in. His eyes — a mixture of blue, green and brown — are relaxed and slightly vacant as they look into mine, a distant sense of familiarity lurking behind them.
His lips press in, and his lower lip bends to the left as he lets out a “hmm” before nodding his head and opening his mouth again.
“How did you die?”
The words rattle around in my head. With each tap on the inside of my brain, I see flashes of my final moments.
I know he’s right. I died.
I climbed up on a chair wearing the dress I’d hoped to wear in my wedding. As I stood there feeling the grooves of the rope on my neck, I remember anxiously thinking, “What if I didn’t tie the knot right?” before I finally just jumped.
I tied it right.
Suicide. Goddamn it. All those assholes in high school were right about me.
“Hung myself.”
He gives a knowing smile and nods.
“Drank myself to death,” he offers in return. “So I guess we have killing ourselves in common. Aren’t we a pair?”
“Is that how everybody gets here?”
“No. People here have died in all sorts of ways. No one knows why we’re here. At least no one I’ve run into.”
After scanning my face, making sure I’m out of my fog, he explains to me where I am.
“This isn’t heaven. Obviously. But you’re not in Hell, either. You’re not in paradise or perdition.”
He turns to face the direction I’m facing. There are cookie-cutter houses lining city blocks. Not like New York City or any big place like that. But some mid-size Midwestern town that could be a stand-in for countless others. He moves his hand in front of us, drawing my attention to the whole picture before me.
“Welcome to the Between, Kid.”
“Between?”
“You’re in a place that the dead go when they don’t really belong to the other two. We don’t have everlasting joy, nor do we experience an eternity of damnation. We simply go on.”
“So, we’re basically just kind of ….. living again?
He lets out a sigh.
“If only. But sadly, no. This isn’t life. In life, things change. They grow. They age. They move. Things don’t change here.”
He raises his arm and points a finger at the sky. The sky looks the same as it always did at dusk/dawn every morning I remember from looking out my window at home. There’s a slight pink and purple strand wisping above the horizon. Lingering or breaking light illuminates the shape of clouds that had been either beyond perception in the night or ever-present during the day.
“The sun will never set or rise for you again,” he explains. “Everything you see in the sky — the colors, the shapes, the amount of light — That’s what you’ll always see when you look up. You will never see more stars. You will never see the blue you knew in life break across the sky. The day, the hour, the moment will never change around us.”
“You’ll forget moonlight ever existed,” he adds. “And ‘sunlight’ will simply be a word you used to say at some point in the totality of existence. You won’t even remember when. But you get used to it. You stop caring pretty quickly. Or if you don’t naturally, this place will make sure it happens anyway.”
For a moment, I expect to feel sadness, but I feel nothing. Just a calm I’ve never known.
“So … what am I supposed to do?”
“What do you want to do? I mean, you’re already dead so you don’t need food or money or a job. The Between is about the size of a continent, so a lot of people spend their time roaming to see what it’s like. I think a lot of them are searching to see if there’s anywhere here where something different happens, like it did in life. But I’ve never heard that anyone reported back finding anything, and it’s not like we have a newspaper here.”
“Other people, like me,” he continues, “kind of just selected our own small corner of this place and chose one of the vacant homes to squat in after we explored this place for a bit. If you want to do that until you figure out what you want to do next, I know one of the houses next to me is vacant, and you’re welcome to claim it.”
The confidence I have in the truth of his words is unnerving. It’s like a memory buried underneath years of experiences that came after it that just takes a little prodding to jump back to the forefront of your mind. Yet, nothing changes in me. I’m still calm.
“Why am I not hyperventilating or freaking out or even breathing heavily right now? This is earth-shattering stuff.”
“Because you can’t. The living have anger and anxieties and panic and pressure and all of that noise that’s always going on. What good is anxiety and fear to the dead? The worst thing has already happened to us. I mean, there aren’t even really fights around here. For example, so we do have cars here. But only ones without much technology. So we’re pretty much stuck with 1950s through 1980s models.The other day I saw a car crash. And part of me was waiting for one of the people to jump out of their car and try to beat up the other person. Instead, they both jumped out of the wreckage of what they were driving, glanced at each other and just walked away.
“Not even so much as a ‘fuck you’. Which you think would be shocking or impressive or … something. But that’s the thing here: We don’t feel those strong emotions. Happiness lives elsewhere, and despair is a thing of our past. We’re stuck in the middle of everything down the line.”
I’m trying to feel anything like I used to. I’m thinking of all of my stockpile of bad memories and traumas I carried all my life to try to at least feel fucking depressed. But still, this calm lingers. I’m fucking dead, and I still don’t get to feel what I want to.
“So, you’re certain this isn’t Hell?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. There are no new days here. I could have gotten here a few days, a week, months or even 1,000 years before finding you in the street just now, based on how we experienced time in life. I’ll never know. And neither will you.”
“I guess I shouldn’t ask how long I was out here then.”
“Not long. I noticed you from my window, and came out a little bit after. You’re brand new, my friend.”
There is an unquantifiable amount of questions I could ask him about this whole situation. Part of me even wants the answers. But is it really important anymore to know, well, anything?
A hand touches my shoulder as I hear him start to speak again.
“Take time to get used to this place. Squat for a while. Try some things out. You’re alright. You’re dead, yes. But you’re still alright.”
I just nod my head.
“Come on, I’ll show you the house I was talking about.”
As we walk down the street, slowly without any thought of pace or distance, he gives me my final little welcome message.
“If you ever start to forget everything I said, try to just remember this one thing about this place and you’ll be fine: Nothing really matters anymore.”
Leave a Reply