The Body Departed (2009) Read online

  “You’re haunting an old apartment building in Los Angeles,” she said. “Sounds a bit like hell to me.”

  “But I can see my wife and daughter whenever I want,” I countered. “Can’t be that bad.”

  “Your wife has already remarried,” said Pauline. “And weren’t you two separated at the time of your death?”

  We had been, but the details of our separation were lost to me. We had financial problems, I seemed to recall, which had led to many arguments. What we had argued about was anyone’s guess. But the arguments had been heated and impassioned, and in the end, I had moved out—but not very far. To stay close to my daughter, I had rented an apartment in the same building.

  “Yes, we had been separated,” I said. “And thank you for reminding me of that.”

  “Just keeping it real,” said Pauline indifferently. “Besides, there is no hell.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I talk to the dead, remember? And not just ghosts,” she added, “but those who have passed on.”

  “Passed on to heaven?” I asked.

  “Passed on to something,” she said. “Neither heaven nor hell. A spirit world—and it’s waiting for you.”

  I didn’t believe that. I believed in heaven and hell, and I was certain, as of this moment, that I was going to hell. “Well, it can keep on waiting. I’m not ready to pass on.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I need to work some things out,” I said.

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “And then I will accept my fate.”

  She nodded. “But for now, you hope to change your fate.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me with bloodshot eyes. Sitting on the couch, she had tucked her bare feet under her. Now her painted-red toes peeked out like frightened little mice.

  “Nice imagery,” she said, wiggling her toes. “So you still can’t remember why you are going to hell?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But it was something bad.”

  “Very bad,” I said.

  “Bad enough to burn forever?” she asked.

  “Somebody died, I think.”

  “So you’ve said, but you still don’t remember who or why.”

  I shook my head. “No, but it happened a long, long time ago.”

  “And with your death,” she added, “it was the first of your memories to disappear.”

  She was right. My memories were disappearing at an alarming rate. The earlier memories of my life were mostly long gone. “Yeah, something like that,” I said.

  “And now you’re afraid to pass on because you think you are going to hell, even though you can’t remember why you are going to hell.”

  “It’s a hell of a conundrum,” I said.

  She nodded, then got up, padded into the adjoining kitchen, and poured herself another drink. When she came back and sat, some of her drink splashed over the rim of her glass.

  “Don’t say a word,” she cautioned me.

  I laughed and drifted over to the big bay window and looked out over Los Angeles, which glittered and pulsed five stories below. At this hour, Los Feliz Boulevard was a parking lot dotted with red brake lights as far as the eye could see. I had heard once that it was one of the busiest streets in the world. Standing here now, I believed it.

  After a while, Pauline came over and stood next to me. Actually, some of her was standing inside me. She shivered with the sensation, apologized, and stepped back. Ghostly etiquette.

  I thought of my sweet music teacher. According to the paper, she had been murdered just days away from her sixtieth wedding anniversary. Sixtieth.

  Anger welled up within me. As it did so, a rare warmth spread through me. Mostly, my days were filled with bone-chilling cold, minus the bones. But whenever strong emotion was involved, such as anger, I became flush with energy. And when that happened—

  “Hey,” said Pauline. “Someone’s making a rare appearance.”

  And so I was. So much so that I could actually see myself reflected in the big sliding glass door. Next to me was Pauline, looking beautiful but drunk. Bloody wounds covered my body—in particular, my forehead, neck, and chest.

  I didn’t get to see myself often, and despite my anger, I took advantage of this rare opportunity. Pale and ethereal, I was just a vague suggestion of what I had once been—and I was growing vaguer as the years pressed on. There was stubble on my jaw, and my dark hair was indeed askew. Eternal bedhead.

  Great.

  “But you’re still a cutie,” said Pauline, giggling, now almost entirely drunk.

  And with those words and that infectious giggle, my anger abated and I started fading away again.

  “Tell me about your murdered friend,” said Pauline.

  “She wasn’t necessarily a friend.”

  She explored my mind a bit more. “My apologies. Your piano teacher from grade school.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would someone kill her?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  She paused, then nodded knowingly. “I see you intend to find out.”

  “Yes.”

  “And perhaps save your soul in the process?”

  “That’s the plan,” I said. “For now.”

  “You do realize you have limits to where you can go and what you can do, right?”

  I shrugged. “Minor technicalities.”

  The girl could see me, and amazingly, she wasn’t afraid.

  Since she and her mother were new tenants in the apartment building I haunted, I swung by to say hello like any good neighbor. And by “swinging by,” I mean I walked straight through their front door and into their living room.

  To my surprise, the little girl immediately looked up from where she was sitting at a desk in the far corner of the room. Her eyes impossibly huge and innocent. She was young, perhaps seven or eight, about the age of my own daughter.

  Hey, maybe they’ll be friends.

  I was in a low-energy state, which meant I was just a murky drift of ectoplasm that was vaguely humanoid and barely visible, even to myself. It would take a keenly aware medium to see me now.

  But she sees you now, I thought.

  Indeed. And a thrill coursed through me.

  She stood slowly from her swivel chair. I could hear her mother in the other room, unpacking and singing contentedly to herself, unaware that her daughter had just made contact with the Great Beyond.

  The girl approached me carefully, as if walking a tightrope. As if, remarkably, she was afraid of scaring me off. Tough girl. She stopped ten feet away. There was a smudge of chocolate in the corner of her mouth. I could see her brain working behind those impossibly huge eyes.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” she said. “I see ghosts all the time.”

  I smiled and impressed the image of a friend into her mind.

  “You’re a good ghost,” she said, nodding. “Some ghosts are not good; some are bad.”

  I next tried impressing the images of my daughter and wife and my apartment down the hall, but none of this got a response from her. She was attuned, but not highly attuned. Like a deaf musician.

  “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” she said. “Mommy thinks I make up the ghosts, anyway. Maybe I do. Maybe ghosts are just figmentals of my imagination, like she says.”

  Despite her bravado, there was still a touch of fear in her eyes. I smiled reassuringly, but I wasn’t sure if she could see the fine details of my smile. She studied me a moment longer, shrugged, then plodded back to her chair. Once seated, she swiveled around and faced me, her bare feet dangling just inches from the faux-hardwood floor.

  I drifted closer and raised my finger, pointing at her computer.

  She followed my finger. “The computer?”

  I nodded exaggeratedly so that she could not mistake the gesture.

  “What about the computer?” she asked.

  I focused on the image of a writing program.

&n
bsp; She studied me. “Do you want me to open Word?”

  I nodded vigorously.

  She turned back to her computer and clicked open Word for Windows. When a blank screen appeared on the monitor, I leaned across her body and drew energy from both her and the computer, and struck a key on the keyboard. Granted, my finger disappeared down through the key, but luckily, the sensitive keyboard recognized my touch. Ghosts and machines sort of go hand in hand.

  A letter appeared on the monitor before her, a Y. I continued typing until I had formed a complete sentence.

  Yes, I’m a ghost was my reply.

  The little girl, who had scooted back in her chair to allow me room, squealed with delight, clapping. “You can type!”

  Yes, I responded, the words appearing on the white screen.

  “Do I need to type back?” she asked me.

  No, I wrote. I can hear you just fine. What’s your name?

  She scooted back in her chair, giving me enough room to type. “Kaira,” she said. “So how long have you been dead?”

  Two years, I think.

  “You think?” she asked.

  It’s getting harder and harder to remember dates.

  She screwed up her little face. “I can see that, I think.”

  You are a smart girl, Kaira.

  “So are you really a good ghost?”

  Yes.

  “Then why didn’t you go to heaven?”

  I thought about that, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. She was just a little girl—no need to burden her with too much information.

  It’s not time, I wrote.

  “You’re not going to heaven, are you?” she said. She was more sensitive than I thought.

  I hesitated, then typed my reply.

  No, I don’t think so.

  “You’re going to hell,” she said.

  I think so, yes. But I’m working on that.

  She pushed her chair back and stood suddenly. She looked at me warily. “Were you a bad man?”

  Yes, I wrote. I’m sure I was. But I don’t remember what I did.

  “But you said you are a good ghost.”

  I’m a good ghost, but I was a bad man.

  She continued watching me cautiously. I didn’t blame her. “What did you mean when you said you were ‘working on that’?”

  I typed, Means, I’m trying to be a better person.

  “But it’s too late,” she said. “You’re already dead.”

  A minor technicality.

  “What’s a technicality?”

  Means I’m working on it, I typed, then added a winky face, complete with semicolon and parentheses.

  “Kaira, honey,” called her mother from the next room, “who are you talking to out there?”

  “No one, Mommy,” said the little girl.

  “Come and help me, sweetie.”

  “Okay, Mommy.” She quickly closed the Word document and turned to me. “I got to go,” she whispered. “You seem like a good ghost. I hope you don’t go to hell.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said, but she showed no indication of hearing me. I smiled at her again and exited the same way I had come, through the closed front door.

  Welcome to the neighborhood.

  It was early morning.

  My daughter was asleep. Most of the building was asleep, except for the security guard who worked the graveyard shift; he would be coming home in a few hours. Maybe I would haunt him later, kill some time until morning.

  I felt restless, detached, ungrounded. Nothing new for a ghost. But tonight the feelings were especially strong, especially poignant. Something was happening, but I wasn’t sure what. Being dead, after all, was still fairly new to me.

  I was in a favorite part of the building—a long interior hallway that morphed into an exterior walkway. The hallway was, in effect, part interior and part exterior, and thus not subject to the regular rules and regulations that govern my haunting. Who made these rules, I didn’t know, but they were there, and one such rule stated that I could not leave the confines of the building.

  Anyway, I followed the interior hallway to the point where it turned into the exterior—or outer—walkway. At this juncture, I could nearly stand outside.

  Nearly, but not quite.

  Still, as I pretended to lean a shoulder against the hallway wall, I could almost feel the cool wind that rustled the leaves of the rustic hillside that jutted up behind the apartment complex.

  As the wind picked up, a part of me wished it would take hold of me and carry me away.

  And where would you go?

  Good question.

  The moon, hanging above the highest trees, looked cold and eternal. I felt cold and eternal. I also felt unhinged and adrift, as if the smallest breeze might blow me away.

  As I continued staring up into the night sky, and as the wind continued passing straight through me, a pinprick of light appeared in the heavens above. It could have been a star, but it wasn’t, and suddenly, I knew why I was feeling so unsettled.

  The pinprick of light grew rapidly into something much more than a pinprick. Much, much more. And it kept growing and expanding until it had burned a hole into the sky. Golden light poured out.

  It was the tunnel to heaven.

  I had first seen the tunnel two years ago.

  I had been asleep. I had been dreaming of work, my baby girl, my failed marriage, and everything in between when a half-dozen loud explosions forcibly yanked me out of my sleep and, apparently, right out of my body.

  To say I was confused was an understatement.

  In utter bewilderment, I found myself floating in my bedroom, floating above my body, as a man, standing in the middle of my room and holding a gun, pulled the trigger again and shot me point-blank in my chest. The explosion was loud, deafening in the confined space. But my body didn’t move with the impact. I was already dead.

  Hell of a bad dream.

  The shooter fell to his knees and dropped his gun and buried his face in his hands. I saw that he was wearing latex gloves. His body shook as he sobbed. Eventually, he got hold of himself, picked up his gun, and stood. He looked down at my dead body. So did I. The sheet was now completely covered in blood and gleaming wetly.

  He quickly left my bedroom, and a moment later, I heard my front door open and then click shut. He was gone, and I was dead.

  Why he killed me, I didn’t know. Why he wept, I didn’t know. Who he was is still a mystery.

  As I hovered above my body, I could smell my fresh blood and I could smell the gunpowder. In the distance, I could hear an ambulance coming, or perhaps the police. Someone had reported the gunshots.

  I’m dreaming; this really isn’t happening. I’m going to wake up any moment now.

  It was then that a bright light appeared above me. I turned away from my body and looked up, and there, replacing my ceiling, was a golden tunnel. Light poured out of it and washed over me, and something close to singing reached my ears. Heartbreakingly beautiful singing. The voice of angels.

  I could see people inside the tunnel. Not people, really, but spirits, souls. They were all glowing.

  The light in the tunnel was inviting. I felt its pull. I wanted to drift up to it. I needed to drift up to it.

  But I also felt fear. No, terror. If I was dead—and I was seriously suspecting that I was not dreaming—then God awaited beyond that golden tunnel. God and judgment and hell.

  So I resisted the pull. I resisted with all my might.

  And that’s when I saw the beautiful dark-haired woman standing in the far corner of my bedroom.

  She approached me slowly, smiling warmly, her hands folded together at her waist. She was wearing a white translucent gown. No, the gown wasn’t translucent.

  She was translucent.

  Good God, I can see through her! This can’t be happening.

  Now she was standing before me as I hovered over my dead body. I tried standing, but I was unable to control my movements. I felt helpless and trapp
ed.

  I’m dreaming.

  “No, James. You have passed on.” Her voice was soothing and full of love. So much love.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, and I saw the tears in her eyes. I think they were tears of joy, but I could have been wrong. I also realized that her lips weren’t moving.

  Yeah, this is a dream.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said. I could hear the panic in my voice.

  The woman held out her hand to me. “It’s okay, James. Take my hand.”

  Never had I felt such love. So real and palpable. It came in wave after wave from this strange woman, washing over me, around me, through me.

  “Take my hand, James. It’s okay. Come with me. I will explain everything to you, but for now, it’s time to go.”

  Her hand was small and elegant and seemed suffused with an inner light that appeared to reach out beyond the hand itself.

  “We need to go,” she calmly said again.

  And with those words, the glowing tunnel above flared in intensity. But instead of taking her hand, I said, “I know you from somewhere.”

  She only smiled as another wave of love washed over me, engulfing me completely.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “You will remember,” she said, “in time.”

  “You are so beautiful.”

  She stepped forward and held out her glowing hand. Like a Michelangelo painting, I reached down for it, and when our fingers touched, a fleeting, haunting image of the two of us flashed through my mind: she and I were in a golden field, with the sun high above. We were desperately, madly in love.

  “I miss you, James,” she said. “We all do. It’s time for you to come home.”

  Something deep inside me was overjoyed by her presence, but it was buried deep beneath the confusion, the horror, and the fear.

  “Don’t be afraid, James,” she said. “You are deeply loved.”

  “I’ve done some bad things,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I don’t want to go to hell,” I said.

  She looked away, and now there were tears on her high cheekbones, burning like golden drops of liquid sun. She said nothing.