Then the light came, a bright pure light behind him that seemed to grow and grow until he was nothing but a silhouette against it. She saw something, something at once beautiful and terrible, and she knew it had come for her.
“Angel,” she whispered, and died.
DEATH WASN’T SUPPOSED to be like this. It was supposed to be nothing. She seemed to be hovering, looking down, watching him get something out of her purse, take her laptop, but none of that meant anything. Then a strong compulsion began pulling her away from the scene, taking her somewhere else, but she had no sense of distance or speed or even really moving. It was more like a transition, as if one instant she was one thing and the next instant she was something else.
Drea kept waiting for the lights to go out, for her sense of consciousness to shut down. She kept waiting for the nothing, though she wondered how she’d know, since only consciousness could comprehend the lack of consciousness and self. But her thoughts remained, her sense of self remained, and it was all very confusing.
So maybe there was no nothing, maybe there was something. Maybe death really was more of a passing than an end. Well, if that were true, wouldn’t she be someone else now? Or would she always be herself, just somewhere and someone else.
In that case, wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of tunnel, with a bright light at the end of it, and people who had loved her and were already dead should be waiting to greet her, right? She’d seen a bright light, and she’d seen something that she thought was an angel, but she’d never seen an angel before so how would she know if that was one? But there was no tunnel, no line of people waiting to greet her, and she began to get agitated.
“Where is everyone?” she asked irritably, the sound curiously flat, as if she hadn’t really spoken and hadn’t really heard anything. This didn’t make sense. If she existed, then she had to exist somewhere, and she didn’t seem to be anywhere. There was nothing around her, nothing and no one.
If death turned out to be a lack of being rather than a lack of consciousness, well, then, that sucked.
“Where am I?” she snapped, unable to control her annoyance. She’d gone years without showing any temper at all, but here she was dead for just a few minutes and already she was losing control.
“You’re here,” a woman’s voice said, and abruptly Drea was there, in an actual place, though she had no idea where that place was. She stood on a rolling green lawn, with fragrant grass soft beneath her feet. The air was rich with the scents of spring, and at such a perfect temperature that it was neither warm nor chilly, but was almost indecipherable. She could hear the drone of bees, and see a bright kaleidoscope of flowers, huge beds of flowers, dotting the landscape. There were trees, and a blue sky dotted with white clouds, and a sun. There were buildings gleaming whitely in an indefinable distance. She saw all of that, and the absolute harmony of it was so beautiful it almost hurt to look around her. What she didn’t see, despite the voice she’d heard, were other people.
“I can’t see you,” she said.
“Ah, give it a moment. You came very fast. Give time a second to catch up.” With that, a woman came into view. She was about Drea’s age, slim and glowing with health, her dark hair pinned up in a haphazard way that looked completely charming. What was disconcerting was the way she came into view, because while she didn’t just appear out of nothing that was almost what happened. It was as if she had lifted aside a curtain and stepped onto a stage with Drea, parts of her becoming visible before the rest of her did.
Other people began appearing, also stepping onto the stage, and with every second that passed Drea saw more and more people, some of them there with her, others walking around and going about their own business. Nine more people joined her and the woman, standing in a loose circle around her. Were they real, or was her dying brain hallucinating? She didn’t know if she herself was real anymore. She touched herself, to see if she still had any substance or if all she had left was a sort of cellular memory of what she had been. To her surprise, though her sense of touch felt oddly off, she seemed to retain a physical body.
Another strange thing was the almost physical sense of…of peace; that was the only word that came to mind. Peace. She began to feel soothed and comforted, and safe.
Gradually she noticed something about the small group of people surrounding her. They all seemed to be her age, roughly thirty, all fit and healthy, all of them attractive even though she could see at least half of them had features that, before she died, she would have said weren’t attractive at all. Now they were. It was that simple. Her eye could make the distinction between attractive and unattractive, but her mind couldn’t. But her eyes didn’t operate independently of her brain, did they? Her brain, then, still had the ability to understand the difference between beauty and ugliness. Was her mind, then, somehow a thing separate from her brain? She had always thought mind and brain were the same thing, but…they weren’t.
Another thing. When she looked at these people, she could sense what they had been before, and that was confusing as all hell because some of them hadn’t been the same sex they were now. The woman who had spoken first was the least confusing, because her image was somehow more solid, less blurred by the overlay of a recent carnation, as if it had been a very long time since she had been anything other than exactly what she was now. Drea concentrated on her, because that gave her mind and eyes a rest. She was tired, and dealing with conflicting layers was more than she could handle right now.
“You see them,” the woman said, faint surprise in her tone, and by “them” she didn’t mean just the other people, but all their other layers of existence.
“Yeah,” said Drea. There was a wealth of communication going on here, things understood beyond what was actually said.
“So soon. You’re very observant.”
She’d had to be, to survive. All of her life she’d watched and studied, judging the best approach to take to get, first, what she needed to live-food. Later, when she was older, she’d studied people more deliberately, to decide how she might manipulate them to get what she wanted.
“Why is she here?” a man asked, not in a nasty tone but in true puzzlement. “She shouldn’t be here. Look at her.”
Drea looked down at herself, though she couldn’t honestly tell what she was wearing. Clothes, yes, but the details were so vague she knew only that they were there. Or, was he seeing the stains of her life layered over her the same way she saw their lives? The details of her life reeled through her mind and she saw them as a film of dirt overlying everything she was and did. Anger flared; she’d done the best she could to survive, and if he didn’t like it-
Just as abruptly as it had flared, her anger died and was replaced by a wash of shame. She’d never done the best she could do. She’d been very skilled at manipulating men to get what she wanted, she’d been a damn good lay, she’d used sex as a weapon, she’d lied, she’d stolen, and though she’d been very good at all of those things, none of her decisions had been based on the best of anything, except maybe the best of two bad choices. She had certainly never looked for a good choice.
She looked squarely at the man, reading him. He’d been an undertaker, she saw; he’d made a living from death, helping families through the grieving process by walking them through the traditional steps. He’d seen everything; he’d prepared bodies ranging in age from babies to the very old. He’d taken care of people whom hundreds had loved and mourned, and those no one had mourned. Death held no surprises for him, and no fear. Death was part of the natural order of things.