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CHAPTER 1
Ian died at midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday. He couldn't be sure which, come to think of it, and now that he was dead the point seemed moot.
That's where the story should have ended. Even Ian would have agreed. Dying was the last thing Ian ever wanted to do, and he'd always assumed it would be. So when he died — either on Tuesday or on Wednesday — Ian thought this was The End.
As you may have already guessed, Ian was wrong about this in almost every respect. This shouldn't be held against him. Ian had been raised without the mind-broadening benefits of Sunday schools, synagogues, Ouija boards, horoscopes, and other types of metaphysical training, and he lacked the important clue that, in a longish book about the only noteworthy slice of his own life story, he had died right at the top of page one. But Ian did die on page one. All things considered, this was something of a shame.
Ian thought this was a shame.
Or rather, a tiny, flickering slip of consciousness that thought of itself as Ian thought that Ian's death was a shame. It was also annoyed. Owing to Ian's T-crossing, I-dotting, nitpicking nature, this tiny, flickering, and decidedly tedious slip of consciousness couldn't rest until it discovered whether its final spark of life had been snuffed out on Tuesday or Wednesday.
These things might matter, it reflected. What if people in the afterlife care about that sort of thing? There could be consequences. Big ones. Rules that apply to people who die on specific days. Netherwordly tax benefits. Seniority based on expiration dates. Or replacement bodies doled out on a first come, first served basis. They might have deathday parties. Or crypt rhymes. Tuesday's corpse is fair of face; Wednesday's corpse will rot in place. That sort of thing.
These things might matter.
Ian resolved to puzzle it out. It's not as though he had anything better to do, what with one thing and another. He'd already noticed death's obliging way of clearing up a schedule.
Ian started with what he knew. He was certain that he'd died at the stroke of twelve. He'd been standing on Platform Six, saying something-or-other about the midnight train to Union Station. Then he'd turned to watch it arrive. A moment later he had slipped, cried "whoops," and fallen base-over-apex onto the tracks. That's when Ian had met the train — or just its underside, really. The meeting had not gone well for Ian. The last sounds he heard had been a clock striking twelve, the screech of the braking train, and the mingled screams and shouts of alarmed commuters.
And "whoops," Ian reflected.
His last word had been "whoops."
Typical, thought Ian.
It was remarkably typical. While Ian had no way of knowing this, the 487th edition of Khuufru's Eternal Almanac ranks the word "whoops" as the fourth most common final utterance of English-speaking humans, hot on the heels of "I'll bet it's harmless," "What happens if I pull this?" and "These oysters seem a bit off." But however run-of-the-mill his own last word had been, Ian was sure he'd said it at midnight. Twelve o'clock, right on the dot. Night noon. Zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds.
It's important not to fall prey to woolly thinking. You might be tempted to think that midnight, what with all of its "witching hour" mythology, is an auspicious time to die. Much more interesting than, say, dying at 8:17 or 9:24. But the problem you're ignoring — and the thing that was really starting to get on Ian's nerves, if he still had nerves — is that midnight is ambiguous. You know where you stand with 8:17 or 9:24, but midnight raises questions. Is it part of yesterday, or today? Tonight or tomorrow? Is it the final tick of one day, or the first tock of the next? Tuesday or Wednesday? Last night or this morning?
Is midnight an ending, or a beginning?
This could be embarrassing, thought Ian, who would have furrowed his brow and scratched his head if he'd still had one. What if there are ... I don't know ... immigration forms in the Hereafter? Name: Ian Brown. Place of Birth: Toronto, Canada. Date of Death: June 5 or 6, not sure which. Ian would hate to spend the first day of his afterlife arguing with some Netherworldly Customs Official about an improperly filledout Form F4-6A (Type T — arrivals by train). Few things could get under Ian's skin like an improperly filled-out form. The whole idea made Ian queasy.
That is, it would have made Ian queasy if he'd still had a physical form. Disembodied spirits lack the plumbing involved in getting queasy. They do have everything they need to become dispirited, however, and that's what Ian did next.
What happens now? Ian wondered. And then he knew: I'm still dying.
He was watching the final flickers of his last few sparks of consciousness while the intact bits of his brain fired their final, parting shots. There was nothing for Ian to do but wait for his last remaining grey cells to stop firing, fizzling, pulsing, or doing whatever it is that dying neurons do. Then he could get on with the job of fading into oblivion.
Ian waited.
Ian waited some more.
The more Ian waited the more he didn't fade into oblivion.
Whether this was a remarkably dull afterlife or a low-budget entry in the Hallucination Sweepstakes, Ian was starting to feel antsy. This presented practical problems, there being few pastimes available to a man who has lost his body. Given this limited range of options, Ian opted for a stroll down memory lane.
Early editions of this book contained a beautifully written account of Ian's reflections on his past. It was eight pages of elegant, artful prose, easily justifying any number of literary awards. Regrettably, editors of the current edition felt that Ian's memories couldn't hold a reader's attention.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Ian's life had been downright dull. He had been the middle child in a middle-income family and had (in his middle years) occupied a mid-level government position in a mid-sized Canadian city. Ian was middling in most respects. The only remarkable thing about Ian was how utterly unremarkable he was. He was beige. He was vanilla. He was almost perfectly average. If you added up all the people in the world and then divided them by global population, you'd have Ian. If mediocrity were an Olympic sport, Ian would finish right in the middle of the pack.
Being killed by a train had been the one newsworthy thing that had ever happened to Ian, and now he wouldn't be around to see the coverage. He could imagine the headlines, though: Man Trips in Front of Train Entering Station: Death by Freudian Slip.
It was at this precise moment — just as Ian had started imagining the text of his own obituary — that whatever homunculus lived in Ian's mind mashed control-alt-delete on its cognitive keyboard and rebooted Ian's sense of the physical world.
Ian almost wished it hadn't. The physical world wasn't friendly.
It was a maelstrom. It was a crashing, churning, Ian-centred vortex in which Ian was being tossed about like change in a dryer. The next thirty-eight seconds were so uncomfortably crowded with activity that they can't be recounted with any degree of precision. There was a lot of movement, though — whirling, spinning, pounding, nauseating movement. And there were sounds: thunderous, churning, torrential, watery sounds. It sounded a good deal like the noises Ian remembered from third grade when a bully had forced him face down into a toilet bowl and flushed.
A "swirly," the bully had called it.
The afterlife was a swirly.
It dawned on Ian — whose speed-of-uptake was impaired by recent events — that he was under water. Discovering this, he struggled for breath. And if he felt the need to breathe, Ian reasoned, he must have lungs, which in turn suggested a body. And if Ian was any judge, that body was not being flushed down a cosmic drainpipe or enduring the Final Swirly, but being swept along by a river that swelled beyond any image captured by the phrase "white water" and fit more comfortably with descriptions like "enraged," "deadly," "torrent," and possibly "uninsurable risk."
Picture the base of Niagara Falls with extra rocks. Very large, very hard, and very uncomfortable-looking rocks.
Ian gasped and sputtered and ricocheted through the rapids for several desperate minutes until the river rounded a bend and spat him toward a gravelly bank. Ian winced, shut his eyes, contrived to cover his tender bits, and hoped for the best.
A heartbeat later he was lying face up beside the river. His body felt like a stubbed toe. He could hear the rapids behind him. In the distance he could detect the ominous rumbling of a storm. In his immediate vicinity he could hear an unmistakably female voice say "Are you all right?" in an equally unmistakable Indian accent.
(That's "Indian" as in Gandhi, not Pocahontas.)
Ian risked opening an eye. His left one, if you were curious.
This is what Ian didn't see: he didn't see a billowing cloudscape populated by winged babies equipped for archery practice. He didn't see an everlasting pit of fire. He didn't see a rainbow bridge, a greeter doling out teams of virgins, or any other popular netherwordly image advertised by mainstream religions. What Ian did see was the most eye-poppingly beautiful woman he'd ever seen. She was dark-skinned, dark-haired, almond-eyed, and wearing a white terry-cloth robe.
She knelt beside him.
Had Ian been asked to describe this woman his description would have depended on two variables, namely (1) Ian's audience, and (2) Ian's age. Had a teenaged Ian, for example, been asked to describe this woman to his teammates on the high-school football team, his description would have featured the word "hot" a number of times as well as "sexy," "gorgeous," and quite possibly "yum." This would have been punctuated by grunts and assorted allusions to anatomical features peculiar to the female form.
If, by contrast, a thirty-something Ian had been asked to describe this woman to a police sketch artist, he might have said, "Female, mid-twenties, East Indian, almond eyes, cappuccino complexion, full lips, shoulder-length black hair ... no, no, the hair is a little wavier than that. And draw the body — you can't have a proper sketch without the body. She was about five-foot-seven, medium build, hourglass figure. No, she was more ... what's the word? More statuesque. Throw in a couple of extra curves. And larger eyes. Make her prettier. Yes, much better. Very nice. Um ... could I get a copy of that?"
And had an Ian in his mid-forties — say, an Ian roughly the age of the one who presently found himself beside the river — been asked to describe this woman to his wife, he would have stammered something along the lines of "pleasant-looking, I suppose, sort of pretty, not really my type, but I'm sure some men would find her attractive in a conventional sort of way."
And Penelope, his wife, would have laughed at him out loud.
Penelope.
Ian had been pulverized by a train, suffered an episode of disembodied consciousness, and body-surfed his way through class-six rapids, yet he hadn't thought about his wife for eight whole pages. Not even once. It was as though there'd been a Penelope-shaped hole in Ian's mind. That was alarming. And it was remarkably unlike Ian. His mental compass generally pointed due Penny. If you'd ever had the chance to take a peek into Ian's thoughts, you'd have been sure to spot Penny smiling up at you in the foreground. You certainly wouldn't have guessed that a train could knock her clean out of Ian's head, so to speak.
So how could Penny have slipped his mind?
A voice in Ian's head assured him that Penny wouldn't hold this temporary bout of spousal amnesia against him, given the circumstances. She had an understanding nature. And she loved Ian: he was certain about that. While anyone else might have described Ian as perfectly, painfully average, Penny had always thought of him as the Golden Mean.
Please don't get the wrong impression. It's not as though Penny was some doe-eyed husband worshipper who was blind to her spouse's flaws. Quite the contrary. She was a razor-witted, independent lioness of a woman and an incisive judge of character. She had to be, in her line of work — but that's getting ahead of the story. For now, just rest assured that Penny hadn't failed to notice Ian's flaws; she simply saw them as integral stitches in the tapestry that was Ian — a tapestry Penny loved as it was, thanks very much, and wouldn't unravel by picking or pulling at errant threads.
Ian had always felt that Penny was the single splash of colour in his otherwise dreary life. And now she was gone.
Well, Ian was gone, really, but it's impolite to quibble.
Penny had been standing with Ian while he'd waited for the train. Why hadn't he thought of that until now? She'd have seen the accident. She'd have watched him die. She'd be distraught.
She'd be a widow.
This depressing bit of reverie was cut short when the Bollywood Bombshell at Ian's side snapped her fingers and cleared her throat.
"Um, hello?" she said, shaking Ian's shoulder and scrunching her face in a mother-henning sort of way. "Are you all right?" She couldn't help it, poor dear, but her appearance was such that everything she said transmitted a strong "come hither" harmonic.
"I'm married," said Ian, loyally.
"Hi, Mary," said the woman, helping Ian to his feet. "My name's Tonto. I'm your guide."
Ian opened and closed his mouth a number of times before settling into the vaguely concussed expression you usually see in calculus tutorials. The effect was not assisted by the fact that Ian was soaking wet, stark naked, and sporting a skin tone that hinted at the regular application of spf 10,000. He looked like a stunned, bipedal cod.
Tonto handed Ian a robe that matched her own. This helpful act drew Ian's attention to the fact that he was naked and, to his mild embarrassment, suffering from the usual anatomical consequences associated with dips in ice-cold water.
"Tonto?" he said, shrugging hastily into the robe. "You're an Indian guide? Named Tonto?"
She gave Ian a puzzled look as though she saw nothing at all unusual in this arrangement. Then she bent down, picked up a knapsack that had been lying by her feet, and slung it over her shoulder.
"What do you mean by 'Indian'?" she asked.
This was no time for quibbling over racial terminology, thought Ian. He was either standing on a riverbank in the afterlife with an Indian guide named Tonto, or experiencing a post-traumatic hallucination that could generate research funding for an army of psychoanalysts. And he was fairly certain, upon reflection, that he'd just been called Mary.
"I'm sorry — but I think you misheard me," he said, exhibiting admirable decorum for a fellow who, by any standard, was having a Bad Day. "I said 'I'm married.' You know, to a woman. Her name is Penelope. Mine's Ian Brown."
Tonto bit her perfect lower lip and furrowed her perfect brow in a way that seemed precisely calibrated to unsettle the Brown constitution. She took Ian's arm, patted him on the shoulder, and began to lead him away from the water.
"You're confused," she said, registering compassion. Disconcertingly sultry compassion. Almost steamy compassion, really. "What you're experiencing is called shared memory," she added. "It'll pass. It's common among the newly manifested."
At least eleven different questions urgently pressed for Ian's attention. These bottlenecked in the neighbourhood of his uvula, tripped over each other, and emerged as a sort of polyphonic gurgle. But it was a vaguely interrogative gurgle that ended with a question mark. Tonto appeared to understand.
"Newly manifested," she repeated. "Like you. Newborns. Freshly formed by the river. You've just manifested today, along with the rest of these people." She turned back toward the river and gestured up the bank. Dotted along the river's edge were dozens of white-robed guides helping men, women, and children out of the water.
"It's how we're born," Tonto added. "Everyone is formed by the river. My own manifestation was twenty-five years ago today."
"Err ... Happy birthday?" said Ian, who felt civility was important.
Tonto flashed a smile that would have taken the pleats from most men's trousers. "I emerged about twenty yards downstream," she said. "That's why I'm here. It's traditional to come back to your point of emergence to celebrate your manifestival."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Beforelife"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Randal NM Graham.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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