David Policar 1995
"That's incredible. You came back to life, just like that?"
Diana had agreed to finish our conversation at my apartment. I prefer to entertain visitors there; the atmosphere is more congenial and there aren't any strangers to wander by and muddy the waters. She was getting half my life's story out of me, so effortlessly I hadn't noticed the time pass until the sky through my eastern window had turned a deep blue.
"Something like that. It took some doing, but I came back." That was the understatement of the year, but it didn't seem appropriate to dwell on the ensuing nightmare of my initiation. The hard part had been adjusting to being half-dead, and putting a downspin on Diana's current condition would just make it harder for her to adjust to it.
"So three days later, you arose?" There was humor in her eyes, but her aura belied it... she meant the question seriously. I chuckled. Would that make me a vampire or a messiah? Either way, she'd be disappointed.
"Only a few seconds, actually. Time doesn't work quite the same way for the discarnate... as far as anyone else was concerned, I'd had a bad trip and had come out the other side OK."
Which was only half the truth, since that's what I thought for a long time, too. It just didn't seem politic to say so.
I'd been a city boy as long as I'd been alive. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, when I died, that the afterlife looked suspiciously like the T station at Government Center... dimly lit, tunnels heading every which way, crowds of package-laden commuters standing by the tracks, staring intently at their shoes, the walls, the lights, anything but each other.
Had I given it any thought, the last thing I would have remembered would have been the wild, frightening sound of my own heartbeat pulsing in my ears, the struggle to force air into my paralyzed chest, and the frantic blurry shapes rushing to deal with my sudden collapse. Perhaps fortunately, I was too dazed to give anything any thought.
I don't know how long I stood there. Maybe minutes, maybe days; it didn't seem terribly relevant to anyone. We had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nobody to see. We were waiting for the train. When it finally arrived, I asked a stooped older woman next to me where the train was headed. She stared at me as if I'd asked her for a brief overview of the current geopolitical situation in South America.
I decided to stay on the track until I knew where I was headed. A moment later the doors slammed shut and the train pushed itself slowly into one of the tunnels. The lights faded away, then the ricketing, until finally I stood on an empty platform in silence.
"There won't be another train for a while," came a voice from behind me. Not quite empty, then. I turned around to see a middle-aged man leaning casually against a column. He was thin and tall, with wispy black hair that turned grey at his temples, dressed in green and brown with a white scarf that trailed his knees. But the thing I most noticed was his smile, a broad honest grin that filled the room.
"Where am I?" I asked, bewildered. "What is this place?"