Nobody True

  No doubt you’ve heard or read about the debates concerning whether the human body is merely the shell that contains the soul, but hell, I was just a teenager at that time, a callow youth who was fairly lucky with the girls, was reasonably good-looking, was healthy, and loved what I was studying and looking forward to a successful career because of it; what did I care for spiritual and religious concepts and theories? I’d hardly given the conundrum a second thought. I have now though. I’ve given it a lot of thought now.

  I suddenly found myself standing by the roadside, on the pavement. And I was looking down at my own body, which had ended up in the gutter by my feet. For a few moments, nobody moved; everything was eerily silent. Then the little boy I’d just avoided knocking down began to bawl. His distraught mother left her car and ran across the road to him, gathering him up in her arms and squeezing him tight. When she whirled around to look at my motionless body in the gutter, her son’s head buried into her shoulder, I saw her face was white with shock. I could only imagine the emotions she was going through, the relief mixed with the fear and concern for the unmoving body lying a few metres away, one leg sticking out from the knee at a ludicrous angle, a trickle of dark blood seeping out from beneath the bashed crash helmet. Other kids, tiny boys and girls in scarlet and green blazers, who had witnessed the accident, began to wail and clutch their mummies, a daddy or two also comforting their offspring. The van driver was still sitting in his van, a dull look of incomprehension on his moon-shaped face.

  As for me, well, I was no longer me, but something aloof from my own self. I felt no pain whatsoever and, for the moment, no confusion either. I was just there, looking down at myself, completely emotionless right then. Soon though, very soon, reason began to kick in.

  Although there was not yet fear, I became curious, then anxious. Was I dead? Was I now in the state that followed death? What was I supposed to do? Hang around, wait for someone – something – to come and fetch me? If so, where was I going? And how would I explain this to Mother? Shit, she’d be cross.

  I bent down to get a better look at myself. My body was lying face up and I appeared quite peaceful, almost serene, as if I were taking a nap. The only thing that spoiled the picture was the awkward-angled leg and that thin trail of blood seeping from beneath the yellow crash helmet and forming a puddle on the hard grey surface of the road. I felt no alarm, unlike the majority of the onlookers, the kids and their mums, maybe a teacher or two, but I was surprised. And did I say curious? Yeah, I was very curious.

  How could this be? Why was I suddenly two persons? I had divided into two, hadn’t I? Something caught my eye. The fingers of one of my hands were twitching, so there was some kind of reaction, if not life itself, still going on. I don’t know why but the movement caused me to examine the hand attached to whatever I had become.

  And I could see it, just as if it was properly made of flesh and blood.

  I wriggled my fingers, a more vigorous effort than those other twitching fingers in the road, and was satisfied that I could both see myself and move myself. My head snapped up as onlookers hesitantly approached the unconscious other me – the real me – as if I were a bomb that might explode at any moment and I was disappointed when no one seemed to notice the other self, the upright one who could wriggle his fingers at will, not by reflex.

  I said something, I don’t know what – maybe I was telling them that I really was all right – but none of them so much as glanced my way. Their attention was directed entirely towards the damaged figure lying in the gutter.

  They gathered round so that my body was blocked from view and I spoke again, but was ignored as before. Then a weird thing happened – well, something peculiar on peculiar: I began to float in the air.

  It was an easy, fluid rise and, or so I thought at the time, completely unintentional. I found myself hovering over the gathering crowd, my own crumpled figure coming into view once more. (Later, I came to realize – once I’d begun to get used to this strange state that is – that the floating had, in fact, been quite deliberate: subconsciously I was afraid of losing sight of my own body even for a moment, probably because I sensed it was my only anchor to reality and normal earthbound life.) I could hear the people murmuring, someone shouting for an ambulance, a man kneeling beside my body, the van driver lurching unsteadily towards the crowd to see the damage, all the while saying over and over again like a mantra to anyone who would listen, ‘It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault, he came straight at me . . .’

  And curiouser and curiouser, there were filmy shapes on the edge of the crowd, human figures that were not quite focused (not to me anyway), forms that you could see right through and which shimmered occasionally like unsettled holograms. They were just standing by watching the action, no different from the other onlookers except they were transparent. One looked up at me – I was pretty sure it was a man, although the shape was difficult to define – and he opened his mouth as if speaking to me. I heard nothing though, apart from the anxious mumbles of the real crowd. But there was something familiar about the spectral man and I didn’t know why. Something . . . No, I had no idea. There was something benevolent about him though.

  Often in dreams one situation can swiftly and easily meld into another, the shift seamless but illogical in the cold light of dawn. Well, that’s how it seemed to me.

  From floating above the scene, I was suddenly and fluidly inside an ambulance where my physical body was strapped to a cot and covered by a red blanket, an ambulance man (who would be called a paramedic these days) easing off my battered helmet to examine the wound in my skull. This, quickly and fluidly again, changed into a hospital emergency theatre where people in white gowns and masks calmly tended my body. I assumed my head and other parts had been X-rayed before the surgeon got to work on me, but I must have missed that bit because I have no recollection of it at all. I hung around the ceiling of the operating room for a time, watching over the medics with concern: if I wasn’t dead already, then I certainly didn’t want to be. Too young to die, I assured myself.

  Next thing I knew I was in an intensive care unit, standing by a bed in which I lay unconscious with a swathe of bandages around the top part of my head. There were three other beds around the room, these filled with patients fitted with IVs and tubes and wires hooked up to little machines. Fade into Mother weeping at my bedside. A nurse lifting an eyelid to check my pupil. A doctor giving me the once-over. My mother again, weeping as before. Then complete fade-out until I woke up.

  I think what had actually happened during this, my second out-of-body experience, is that the other me, the one with no flesh and blood form, had returned to my body from time to time. To my unconscious body, that is. And because I was in a coma for a couple of days, with no conscious thought, I had no natural memories of that period.

  When I finally came round, much to the relief of my mother and my friends, I kept quiet about the odd experiences, a) because I didn’t understand them myself and b) because I didn’t want everybody to think the head trauma had short-circuited the wires in my brain.

  I recovered quickly, you do when you’re young. My leg took a little while to mend (still had the occasional twinge up until my death), but the hairline fracture in my skull soon healed with due care and attention of the medics and nurses (I dated one of the nurses for a while when I got out, a pretty redhead of Irish descent but no accent). Despite heavy bruising there was no internal damage. In short, I’d been bloody lucky; and so had that little boy, thank God.

  Physically, I was soon back to normal. Mentally? That was something else.

  Oh, and the motorbike was wrecked, by the way, and I never bought another one. Death or injury comes too easily on those things.

  4

  Figure this . . .

  A woman walks into a London police station, her step awkward, slow, kind of stiff. Much of her face is covered with dark drying blood. Blood also ruins her blouse and jacket just below her left breast.

  I
n faltering words, she speaks to the duty sergeant, who is more than a little surprised, maybe nervous too – the visitor’s face (the part that could be seen) is chalky white in stark contrast to the burnt umber bloodstains. And her clothes are a mess, stockings or tights laddered, dirt on her knees and hands. She is wearing no shoes.

  The woman’s voice is somewhat forced and gargled, as if internal blood has risen and is congealing inside her throat, and the policeman struggles to make out the words she says. But he understands enough to catch the meaning.

  The deathly pale woman is telling him that she wishes to report a murder. Her own. A name is almost spat out, but it is coherent. Then the woman drops dead. Or so the policeman thinks.

  A police doctor is called, who quickly examines the body and asserts that the woman is, indeed, dead. But the doctor is puzzled and adds another diagnosis.

  The corpse is taken away and because there is some confusion, if not mystery, about her condition, a postmortem is swiftly carried out.

  The pathologist confirms the doctor’s first conclusion: at the time the woman had walked into the police station, her body was already in the first stages of rigor mortis, indicating she had been dead for at least forty-five minutes.

  How so? Later.

  5

  I continued to have those OBEs. Sometimes they were vague, like a partially remembered dream, while at other times they were perfectly clear yet somewhat unreal in their flow, like movies that have been badly producer-edited. There were gaps in the order, you see, as if I’d reverted to my sleeping body for a while where even my subconscious seemed to be in repose.

  The thing is, they no longer needed to be sparked off by any sort of trauma, they started to happen of their own volition when I was near to sleep, body and mind completely relaxed. They occurred only perhaps once or twice a year at first, but then I began to control them – at least, I tried to control them. I’d lie in bed alone and concentrate on leaving my body at will, but nothing transpired at those first clumsy attempts, either because I wasn’t relaxed enough, or was trying too hard. I learned that OBEs are not something that can be controlled entirely at will.

  I also realized that between the hot potato incident when I was seven and the motorbike accident when I was seventeen, there had, in fact, been a few other OBEs, when I’d wandered through empty darkened school classrooms, visiting my own desk, or flights when I seemed to be high over the city, with thousands of lights below, many of them moving traffic headlights. I’d put these down to dreams, very, very clear dreams. What did I know? I was just a kid. But dreams always fade with time, if not on awakening, and these excursions or ‘flights’ never did. I nearly always remembered them.

  As I got older I began trying consciously to put myself into the OBE state, lying in bed at night and imagining I was looking down at myself from a corner of the ceiling. At first, I’d choose a point above me, think of a small bright light glowing there, then I’d will myself to join it. Nothing really happened though, at least not for a long while. I even used dope – marijuana only, nothing hard – to see if it would help, you know, put me into a relaxed state, free my mind, transcend the norm, but it never worked. I almost gave up until one day in my last year at art college I was bored and listless – a hand-lettering class, I seem to remember, always a drag for me – when suddenly and without warning I was gone.

  This was a weird phenomenon (I agree, it must always sound weird to anyone – which means most people – who has never been through it themselves) because it was daytime, the sun shining gloriously through a window – maybe its warmth enhanced my drowsiness – and nothing physical had jolted me; no trauma and certainly no accident. One moment I was trying to get the curve on a Century Old Style cap ‘S’ right with my 3A sable paintbrush, next I felt a kind of shifting within me, as if I were being gently hoovered out of my skin, and then I was floating above my own head.

  Now on this occasion and after the initial surprise – oddly, there was no apprehensive shock involved – I decided I was going to examine the experience rather than just live it. It was as calculating as that. No alarm, no concern that I might not be able to re-enter my body again, no panicky thoughts about death. I could see myself with exquisite clarity, my figure and everything around it finely defined. I noticed the tip of my paint-brush was poised about a millimetre above the letter ‘S’ and my arm – my whole body, in fact – was perfectly still, as if I’d been frozen there. Other people in the artroom were moving: the girl student next to me was wiping her T-square with a clean rag, while on another table, a friend of mine was carefully dipping his brush into an inkpot as our tutor, a thin dandified Swiss with a wispy blond moustache and slicked-back hair, was turning the page of a typeface book opened out before him on the desk top, unconsciously tucking an over-spilling cream handkerchief back into his breast pocket with his free hand as he did so. A round clock with a dark-wood frame ticked on the wall. Someone sneezed. Someone else said, ‘Bless you.’ A putty rubber fell off a table and a student bent to retrieve it. All was normal. No one was taking any notice of me.

  I wasn’t scared. I guess I was too curious for that. I just felt cool about the whole situation. And because of that lack of anxiety I was able to examine my situation calmly.

  I decided to see if I could move about and instantly I could. Just by willing myself I floated to the other side of the artroom, observing the heads and hunched shoulders of the students at work as I did so. I half-expected some of them to look up as I passed over, perhaps disturbed by the breeze I must be creating, skimming along like that. I thought my tutor might bark, ‘You there, True, come down from zat ceiling and get back to your pless!’ in that prissy accent of his, but he continued to study his book, one finger of his hand dipped deeply into his breast pocket as he settled the silk hanky. I could see myself – I’d stretched both hands out in front of me like some ethereal Superman and they were plainly visible – so why couldn’t the teacher and students see me? (At that time, of course, I hadn’t yet come to understand that it was my mind filling in what it expected to see.)

  Hovering over a bright window, I turned back to the class. The notion of passing through the window glass had occurred to me, but while remaining perfectly levelheaded, I was a little anxious about wandering too far from my natural body. I really did not want to lose sight of it, and I think that was quite reasonable. What if I got lost outside? What if there was a point where the spirit (or whatever I was up there, hovering inches away from the ceiling) became too separated from the physical body and something, some invisible connection, snapped, making re-entry impossible?

  Anyway, during that time in the artroom I was, as mentioned, pretty cool about the situation, even if I was reluctant to let my material self out of sight. I looked around, took notice of things, considered how I felt about my condition, then, and only after several minutes, I became eager to get back into my body. (It was like resisting one last chocolate from the box because you’ve already had too many.) And the moment I felt that way I was back.

  I don’t recall any journey across the room, nor dipping myself into my natural form; I was just there, looking at the world through my physical eyes once more. Only then did I begin to feel some panic, but it was mild. I think I was too stunned to experience overwhelming anxiety. Soon I was plain curious as well as elated. I’d gone through something rare – at least I thought it was rare, because I’d never heard of this sort of thing happening to anyone on a regular basis, although I’d read of one-off dream-flying and of survivors who claimed they had left their bodies while close to death.

  I sat there bemused, worrying that my cracked skull had its aftermath, that the impact had messed with my brain and was creating hallucinations, fantasy trips. But I’d been too passive during the experience and observed too much too clearly for this to have been an illusion. Besides, everything else in the room had been quite ordinary and the other students’ behaviour perfectly normal.

  Laying my paintbrush
down, I sank back into my chair. What the hell was going on? I remembered the hot potato incident, then the immediate consequences of the motorcycle accident. I’d told the doctors of my out-of-body experience and they’d just smiled benevolently and explained that when the head – the brain, more specifically – took such a hard knock, it often went into some kind of seizure, perhaps losing control for a short time, so that visions in the unconscious state might seem like reality. Nothing to worry about, but a few tests would be in order.

  Scans showed nothing amiss as far as my head was concerned; fortunately, the fracture had been minimal, the bone barely penetrated, and the brain itself revealed no evidence of swelling or injury. Rest up, give yourself time for the leg to heal and the skull’s light fracture to knit together. Any trauma to the head could be dangerous and cause concern, no matter how light the blow, but in this case, there appeared to be no such problem. A little surgery on the leg was all that was required.

  It was some months after the artroom OBE that I began to think back and re-examine some of the ‘dreams’ I’d had from the age of seven onwards, dreams that had not gradually faded from memory as they were supposed to, those that had lingered in my thoughts because of their extreme clarity and almost rational content. In them, I’d visited places I’d only heard or read about, art galleries (paintings and sculptures had fascinated me from an early age), playgrounds, and homes of schoolfriends. I’d spied on my mother as she sewed the lapels of handmade suits while pausing every so often to watch her precious soaps and game shows on the small television we owned and which lit up an otherwise dreary corner of the room. There was no sense of adventure with these dream excursions, nothing exciting about them at all really, and this was what eventually made me realize they were something other than natural dreams.