He slept all through the rest of the day and into the night, soundly and dreamlessly, only to wake with the sun and the sound of the TV tuned to his favorite early-morning show. A glance at the clock showed that it was ten till five. Rising, he staggered into the kitchen and watched as the coffeemaker clicked on and began to burble. The nearly stale doughnut sitting alone and forlorn on a plate on the counter did not tempt him.
He found that his brain could once more focus on the minutiae of everyday life. One of those was the need to report the details of the burglary to his insurance agent. He savored the written presentation he intended to prepare. Anything that smacked of reality, even additional paperwork, was a welcome reminder that he was back where he belonged.
As he waited for the coffee to finish and contemplated what he might prepare to accompany it, he glanced at the TV. The five-o’clock news was just coming on. The morning of his world seemed normal enough. There was the usual reporter’s grab bag of troubles and triumphs, economic and political news, weather that was worse everywhere else in the country, and soft-core human-interest stories. These last were the items that drew most of his attention, since they were the same ones he wanted to make his own business.
There was an interview with the glazed-eyed bomber of an abortion clinic in Massachusetts, whose beatific expression reflected the inner peace of the killer who knows for a certainty that he murders for God. This was followed by the story of a dog lost in Kansas who made its way back to its owner in Toledo, a report on the critically underfunded state of Long Beach city schools, an interview with a Santa Monica city bus driver retiring after an unprecedented forty-nine years cruising the same route, a couple of rapes and thefts, and lastly, a shoot-out at a popular nightspot in Venice Beach that had left a security guard, two unruly patrons, and one reporter dead. He perked up. The club was an exciting but unsavory one he had visited numerous times himself.
The channel four news anchor’s voice was an educated accusation. A fight had broken out and the security guard had tried to intervene. As for the unlucky reporter, he had made an effort to try and diffuse the situation while simultaneously interviewing both of the eventual participants in the gun battle. Drugs were rumored to have been involved. As the report wound energetically toward a conclusion, the names of the deceased were given. Andrew Vashon, Efren Rodriguez, Dervon Crispas, Maxwell Parker …
No.
Coincidence. Too much of a coincidence, sure, but coincidence it had to be. Maddeningly, the report did not say whether the deceased Parker had been the hapless reporter, or the security guard, or one of the demised disputants. He wanted to reach into the set and grab the utterly self-possessed anchor, shake her out of her chipmunk drone, make her go back through her readout, and sift for the information he desperately needed.
It did not matter, he told himself. Coincidence it had to be. Since reality was back where it belonged, the story could not be referring to a murdered para of his. He was in his apartment, watching TV, considering what to eat for breakfast. Patently and irrevocably, he could not also be a dead man on a slab in some west-side morgue. Executing a small cliché could only confirm what he already knew. Reaching down with a hand, he pinched his leg.
And felt nothing.
He squeezed the skin again, harder—to no avail. Quietly frantic, he ran into the kitchen. The coffeemaker had finished its job and the half-full carafe awaited him, black and steaming. Reaching for the carafe, he wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled it toward him, intending to spill some on his bare thigh. The fingers closed and pulled—but the carafe remained on the nightstand, unmoved and undisturbed. His fingers had passed cleanly through the plastic handle.
Looking down, he saw that he was but a pale shadow of his former self. Literally. Through the pallid outline of his thighs he could see the bed, and the floor. He held his hands up in front of his face and found that he could see through them, as well.
Again he tried to lift the carafe and failed. Putting one hand around it he thought he could feel a faint warmth, but that was all. Every time he tried to move the container, his fingers slid through it as though they were composed of ashen air.
That was him who had been killed at the nightclub, he realized dully. According to the news report he, Maxwell Parker, was right and truly dead. Only, in this world, he was also present. He was, as one might say, a mere ghost of himself.
It was heartbreaking. Everything else since the delirious hot dog had been so familiar, so achingly normal. He was home, back in his own world for sure. But only as an echo of himself. In his current discorporeal guise he could not even contact Boles to ask for help.
There was no point in staying in the apartment. Stumbling into the den, he headed for the door. Instead of yielding to his grasp, the knob slid through his fingers. Or rather, his fingers slid through the knob. Astonished, he stared at the door where his arm had penetrated up to the wrist. Presumably the rest of his ghostly fist was present on the other side, the fingers wriggling freely out in the hall. Experimentally, he leaned forward.
And found himself in the hallway, having passed without resistance through the solid door.
The ocean had always been his refuge, the sea his most understanding therapist. Stepping into the elevator, he tried to push the button that would take him down to the ground floor. As he did so, he found himself beginning to slip, falling slowly through the floor of the elevator. After a moment of panic, he relaxed. He was drifting, rather than plunging, down through the shaft. Not that it mattered. He was already dead anyway.
At the bottom, he climbed out and headed down the hall, striding effortlessly and painlessly through the solid steel door at the far end. Outside, the world was as orderly as the one within his apartment. The same children chased each other across the beach, the same tanned and mindless young men ran and roughhoused by the water’s edge, the same sleek women roasted themselves in the Pacific sun.
He crossed the street and the parking lot beyond. As he trudged across the beach, gliding through sand that previously would have slowed him down, he paused once to bend and study the figure of a particularly attractive woman who was sitting on a beach lounge reading a magazine of more gloss than substance. Even when he knelt near enough to kiss her, she did not move. Her only reaction came when he actually pressed his mouth to hers. Frowning slightly, she rubbed the back of her hand several times against her lips, as if scratching a minor itch, before returning to her negligible reading. Needless to say, she did not notice his nakedness because she did not notice him at all.
Resigned at last to his anesthetized condition, he rose and continued on toward the water. What would happen if he kept going? he wondered. Surely a ghost could not drown. Would he float, or sink, and if he sank, could he walk all the way to China? Or at least, he thought, editing down an ambition unrealistic even for a ghost, to Catalina?
He paused at the edge of the foam-lipped, transparent surf. Children made ecstatic by sun and sea raced around and through him, as did serious-faced, inward-gazing joggers. Once, a Frisbee soared right through his head, causing him to flinch as it approached his eyes. There was no discomfort, no feeling whatsoever as it passed through his forehead and out the back of his expensive haircut. He was ignored by everyone, seen by no one. He was invisible, incorporeal, insubstantial. As they would have said in the South, day-ed. But not gone.
That’s why he was surprised when the nude older man spoke to him. It was not the smiling senior citizen’s buck-naked corpus that startled him. He was no more nude than Max himself. No, he was disconcerted because the oldster was not only looking directly at him, but also speaking to him. There was no mistaking it. Then he thought about it, his focus seemed to unpuddle, and he saw why, and understood.
The old man was a ghost, too.
“What happened to you, son?” The oldster’s voice was appropriately ethereal and slightly shaky.
“I—I guess I died. I just watched a news report that informed me I was shot
in a bungled drug deal.”
The elder ghost shook his head sadly. “Bad business, that drug nonsense.” He gazed wistfully inland. “I remember when this was a pleasant city to live in. Civilized, you know. People were nice to each other, even if everyone didn’t have a house in the suburbs and a pool and two cars. That’s because they expected to, someday.” He returned his attention to the spectral Max.
“Lower expectations invariably lead to higher crime rates.”
“But I wasn’t there,” Max tried to explain. “What I mean is, I wasn’t there in this world. The real me didn’t die.”
The old ghost made clucking sounds with his tongue and shook his head knowingly. “That’s what they all say.”
“It’s true!” Max found that no matter how loudly he strove to shout, the level of his speaking voice never changed. Death, he thought glumly. The ultimate censor. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand even if I took the time to try and explain it to you. I don’t really understand it myself.” He looked up the beach. “I would’ve thought there’d be more of you.” He could not bring himself to say “us.”
The old man sniffed and rubbed his nose. It was bulbous and slightly warty. Despite the fact that he had clearly reached a ripe old age before passing on, he was in comparatively good shape, especially for one of the deceased.
“You are new to this business, aren’t you, son?”
Max smiled wryly. “I haven’t been dead for very long, if that’s what you mean.”
“Rookie. It shows. This is Limbo, son. The place where ghosts reside.”
“I thought it was Santa Monica,” Max joked. Nervously, he looked around for the ghost of himself that had died in the shoot-out at the club, but did not see him. Perhaps the shade of his shade was walking another section of beach.
The oldster did not crack a smile.
“Only those who die violently or unexpectedly or both, unsettled in mind and spirit, spend time here as ghosts. Those who perish of natural causes or with peace in their hearts pass on to the next level. Whatever that is. No ghost has ever returned to tell about it. But we know it’s there.”
Max was curious in spite of himself. “If no one’s ever come back to elucidate, then how do you know there is a next level?”
The old man let out a sepulchral snort. “For the obvious reason that when ghosts disappear, they have to go somewhere.” Raising a hand, he pointed out to sea. “There’s Charlie. Hey, Charlie! Got a rookie here!” Out among the waves, a middle-aged male shadow body-surfed alongside healthy young board surfers oblivious of his presence.
“That’s Charlie,” the oldster added redundantly. “Got smacked upside the head with a board driven full force by a ten-foot wave. Bad juxtaposition of bone and fiberglass. He’s been body-surfing ever since.”
Max watched the other ghost’s oceanic antics. “Doesn’t sound like such a bad way to spend a piece of eternity to me.”
The old man maintained his solemn expression. “He can’t feel the water. It’s kind of like making love to a shadow. Which you may also have the opportunity to do, depending on the length of your stay here.”
“I’m not staying here.” Max was firmer in his resolve than in his confidence. “I’ll be moving on, to another parallel world. One in which I’ll be alive. You can bet on it.” He turned away. “Not that I much care anymore.”
The senior eyed him speculatively. “Well now, that’s certainly a different take on things. Parallel worlds, eh? And you reckon that in one of these so-called parallel worlds you’re still alive, is that it?”
“In all of them. Or,” Max corrected himself, “in most of them. That’s been the case so far, anyway.”
“Interesting. So tell me: You think that maybe I might still be alive in one or more of these parallel worlds, too?”
“It’s possible,” Max told him, without having a clue as to whether it was really possible or not.
His sage beach companion sighed profoundly. “I’d like to think it so. The attractions of Limbo wear thin in a hurry. It’s temporary temporal immortality without any of the pleasures of reality. Scientist fella told me that, once. Course, he was dead, too.” The oldster tapped his chest with an open palm. The expected hollow sound was absent. “Something about working with solid fuels. The experiment produced plenty of push. Unfortunately for him, a fair bit of it pushed right into his chest.”
“What about you?” Max thought to ask. “How did you die?”
“It’s not really considered polite to ask, son—but I reckon that since you’re new, I can overlook it this time around. Besides, ghosts don’t have a lot to talk about.” He shrugged. “I got knocked down and mugged near the corner of Bundy and Pico. Right outside Nu-Way Chili Dogs. Not far from here.”
“And that’s what killed you?”
“Hell, no! I got up and chased the punk. In my day, people didn’t get away with shit like that. Fifty pedestrians would’ve jumped him. But like I’ve been saying, times have changed. It was left up to me.
“So I ran the little prick down, I did. Been running marathons all my life, to keep in shape. Cornered the little bastard behind a furniture repair shop. That’s when I saw he couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Tired and sweaty and scared, he was. So I told him we’d forget it, and let’s talk.”
Max nodded thoughtfully. “How did he respond to that?”
“Shot me four times, the little bugger.” The oldster tapped his torso. “Here and here, here, and here. Don’t remember if I said anything after that. Don’t even remember if I was angry, or sad, or a little bit mad. But I sure was dead.” For the second time he sighed heavily. “Don’t really matter. I was seventy-eight. Probably could’ve broke ninety, but it don’t really matter. What matters is that poor, sorry-ass, gonna-die-before-he’s-twenty kid, and the fact that I can’t help him now.”
They stood in silence for a while, watching the surfers and the gulls, the joggers and the sunbathers, chatting amiably about the absent inconsequentialities of life and remarking on the shocking indifference with which the living treated it. After a while, two young couples came walking down the beach toward them. They halted, expressions of supreme confusion on their attractive faces. The men were twins and the women likewise.
Seeing double again, Max thought. Except that he was dead, and the old man he had been talking with was dead, and with the sun and scenery shining through them, both of these unhappy couples were most assuredly dead.
“Maybe you can help us,” one of the youthfully demised inquired hopefully. “We seem to have something of a problem here.”
“I’ll say you do.” Somehow Max was not surprised. But then, at this point there was very little that was capable of surprising him. “When did you die?” he asked the nearest of the two couples.
The pair exchanged a limpid glance. “Nine-twenty this morning,” the young woman replied softly. “I know because I remember checking the watch on the arm of my body as they were loading it into the ambulance.”
Max turned to the other couple. “And you?”
“Nine-twenty-one,” the man replied firmly as he glared at his double.
The reporter turned to the old man, who was looking on curiously. “See? It’s just like I was telling you.” He gestured at the couple on his left. “Sir, madam—meet your paras. Para ghosts, that is.”
Apparently, he told himself resignedly, even ghosts could have paras. They never would have met, of course, if he did not transport the effect of the Boles Field with him wherever he went. The revelation opened up an entirely new field for metaphysical speculation.
One that his overloaded psyche wanted nothing to do with.
“I don’t understand.” The pale young woman on his right was very pretty, Max decided. She must have made a beautiful corpse.
Teenagers cavorted in paroxysms of aimless delight while adults looked on tolerantly. Gulls swooped and snapped at errant french fries that tumbled like the softened feathers of Icarus from young fingers he
ld too close to the sun. California girls sleek as the blond sea lions of south Australia strutted the boundary between sea, sky, and sand, inviting ogles and comparisons. In the midst of all this life, six ghosts discussed the transitory nature of life and existence.
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” Max began.
His elderly companion chipped in. “He’s been trying to educate me about it, and it still don’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“In the real world, in my world,” Max told them, “an amateur scientist invented a machine that generates a field that allows whoever is caught within that field to move between parallel worlds. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to turn it off, or negate the effects. This field travels with me, or maybe I travel within it as it moves around. I’m not sure which. All I know is that I’ve been jumping between parallel worlds faster than a politician switches their stance on entitlement cutbacks.
“At first I thought it was going to drive me crazy. Since I’m not crazy yet, I guess that’s not going to happen.” He offered a crooked smile. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer it that way.” He indicated the seething, crowded beach scene.
“In this para, I’m dead, and a ghost. So is my friend here. So are you. But in your case, the Boles Field has snapped you into a para with me in which your para selves have also died. That’s why there are two sets of you. One comprised of the real ghosts, the other of para ghosts. That’s not to say that you’re not both real. Or equally unreal. You are. You’re just paras of each other.”
The skeptical young man on the left looked at his diffident companion, then back at Max. “You’re wrong. You are crazy.”
Max smiled tolerantly. “Like I’m really going to accept an opinion on the matter from a ghost. Were you a psychiatrist when you were alive?”
“No.” The youth’s expression fell. “I drove a truck. Delivered snacks and sundries to convenience stores. But I had hopes. High hopes.” He hugged his downcast companion. “We’d been married three weeks.”