The split second after I died I found myself standing on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, but I knew I wasn’t really in Brooklyn. First off, I was murdered in Newark, New Jersey, and I remembered my death vividly, but even without that I would’ve known I wasn’t really in Brooklyn given how unnaturally quiet it was without another single person in sight. And while Montague Street looked pretty much as I remembered it, some of the buildings were wrong, and some of the stores lining the street were from my childhood instead of the present day. I probably couldn’t have articulated at that precise moment that I was in a version of hell of my own making, but at some level I knew that was what had happened.
I started walking
west on Montague Street so I could see whether the Manhattan skyline was still
there, and it was, at least mostly as I remembered it. I’m sure some of the
buildings were wrong, but it still seemed very real to me even though I knew it
wasn’t. After I stood gaping at the skyline for what seemed like an eternity
but was probably only minutes, I headed south toward Coney Island. I don’t know
why exactly but I guess I wanted to see how much of my version of Brooklyn
existed. I knew many of the street signs I passed weren’t right—they were from
other neighborhoods, and some of them from other boroughs. And then there were
other street signs that were too blurry to make out. But none of that mattered,
because by then I knew where I really was. Still, though, I kept walking. At
one point, I stopped to look at my reflection in a storefront window and
realized that I was wearing a cheap suit and a fedora. When I was alive I never
wore a hat, and almost never wore suits, and certainly never the fifty-nine
dollar variety that I had on. At the time I was murdered I was wearing jeans,
tennis sneakers, a polo shirt, and a leather jacket, which was what I usually
wore when I worked my job as an investigator. Still, on seeing my reflection in
that window, the suit, scuffed up shoes, and hat seemed right
I was somewhere
in Bay Ridge when this man who looked like he’d been dropped in from the eighteenth
century wandered into view. I was never much of a history buff, but that was the
way he looked given his blue satin waistcoat, frilly silk shirt, and
knee-length breeches, as well as his overall shaggy appearance. As he shuffled
toward me, he looked almost like he could’ve been an extra from a zombie movie,
although one set several hundred years in the past. His expression was a rictus
of fear, and there was only deadness in his eyes. I gave him a wide berth as he
ambled past me and watched as he staggered to the front of an eight-story
brick building. He stood transfixed for a long moment, and then all at once
started clawing at the brick wall and violently smashing his face against it,
and he did this quietly without ever uttering a sound.
I picked up my
pace after that trying to put some distance between us, and it was only seconds
later that I left Brooklyn and found myself someplace entirely different.
Instead of the Brooklyn streets where I’d been walking for hours, behind me now
were meadows and a mountain range that was of such lush greenness that it
seemed more like a painting than anything real. The sky that had been a grayish
white in my version of Brooklyn was now a deep blue, and the sun that had
earlier been missing behind New York smog and clouds was shining brightly
overhead. Off in the distance were groves of a tall and thin variety of pine
tree that I’d never seen before, as well as other types of trees, shrubs, and
plants that were foreign to me, and up ahead past rolling meadows was a
sparkling ocean made up of different shades of blues and aquamarines that were very
different from anything I’d ever seen of the Atlantic Ocean from Coney Island.
I trekked across
the meadows toward the ocean, and as I got closer I could see palm and coconut trees
along a crescent-shaped beach, and in the middle of this a person lying on a
lounge chair.
I had to climb
down a steep incline of rocks to get to the beach, and as I did this, I could
see that the person was a woman wearing a floral-patterned beach cover-up, her
hair a perfect silver. There was an empty lounge chair next to her, and between
her chair and the other was a small drink stand on which sat a glass containing
a brownish-orange drink with a hibiscus flower floating in it.
She heard me
approaching and turned her head toward me. She was wearing sunglasses so I
couldn’t see her eyes, but her expression at first was one of disinterest. That
changed as she smiled thinly at me, and with a wave of her hand, invited me to
sit next to her. She looked ageless yet not young with perfect, unwrinkled skin
and a slender, attractive body. If it wasn’t for her well-coifed silver hair,
she could’ve passed for being in her thirties. After I settled into the lounge
chair next to her she held out a manicured slender hand and introduced herself
as Olivia Danville, her accent sounding as if she came from England and was
from money.
“Mike Stone,” I
said.
When I took her
hand I expected to feel something cold and clammy. After all, we were both
dead. I was surprised to find how warm and dry her skin felt.
“Where am I?” I
asked.
That caused a
wan smile to form over her lips. “Where do you think you are, Mike?”
“I’m guessing I
wandered from my version of hell into yours. Yours isn’t bad. We’re on a tropical
island in the Pacific?”
“Very good,
Mike. Yes, my reality, or hell, ended up being Kapalua, Maui. We’re on probably
the nicest beach on the island. Not the biggest by any stretch, but the prettiest.”
As I looked out
at the ocean I realized it wasn’t just the two of us out there. There were
others in the water. I could make out several bodies that were floating face
down before they sank, and only a minute later an elderly woman’s face popped
up out of a wave before she disappeared for good. Olivia must’ve noticed me
staring at these drowning people, but she didn’t comment about them. Instead
she asked me if I knew how I died.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It would be hard to forget this soon. It only just happened.”
“What do you
mean by that?”
“It was only a
few hours ago that I was fatally shot, and then the next thing I knew I was in
Brooklyn wearing different clothes than what I had on when I died and without
my chest ripped open by a .45 slug. Except it wasn’t really Brooklyn, only a
version of it that I somehow created. And now I’m in your version of hell,
which lucky for you happens to be Hawaii.”
She shifted in
her chair to get a better look at me. I couldn’t see her eyes because of her sunglasses
but I knew she was staring at me intently. She shifted again in her chair so
that she was back to gazing out at the ocean.
“Do you know
what you did to end up in hell?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know
exactly why I’m here.”
We sat quietly
after that for several minutes. When she spoke next it was to ask me why I
thought I ended up in her version of hell. I told her it was probably because
her version was stronger than mine. “Somehow I got sucked into yours, although
I’m guessing if I walked back to where I came from I’d find myself again in
Brooklyn.”
She picked up
her drink and brushed the flower away from her mouth so she could take a sip.
She carefully placed the glass back on the stand. “Your level of awareness is
quite remarkable,” she said. “Out of the billions of souls here in hell only a
tiny percentage have any sense of awareness, and very few of those would know
what you already do this quickly after dying. Do you feel sick yet?”
“I feel fine.”
“Incredible. You
should’ve been feeling quite ill by now.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s what
happens when you’re pulled into a stronger reality, at least for the first few
times in that same reality.”
A larger wave
than any of the others crashed onto the beach, and it washed a man’s crumpled body
onto the shore. The suit he wore was badly torn and he was covered in seaweed, and
from what I could tell it looked like the type of suit someone would’ve worn in
the early nineteen hundreds. His face was hidden from me, but from how
unnaturally bloated and white his hands and exposed skin looked I would’ve
guessed he’d been in the water for months, if not much longer. It probably
shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did when he pushed himself to his
knees and crawled back into the ocean, and he soon disappeared under another
wave.
“Those souls out
there drowning,” I said. “What is it with them?”
“You should be
able to explain that as well as I can.”
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