“That’s right,” agreed his male para. “Eighteen-wheeler on the Marina Freeway had a double blowout right in front of our car. It rolled, and we piled right into it.”
The old man nodded understandingly. “You’re lucky. You died before you had to see what you looked like at the time of death. There are some stragglers wandering around this city who weren’t so lucky.” He made a face. “They’re convalescent—all ghosts are—but they’re not real pretty to look at. Ambulatory ectoplasm can exist in some mighty strange shapes.”
“We don’t want to be dead.” The young woman on the left eyed her perfect double uncertainly. “We were just starting our lives together. We had everything to look forward to.”
“Sorry,” the oldster informed them. “You have my sympathies, for whatever good the sympathies of the deceased may be. Bad luck.”
Her husband stared at his duplicate. “If we really are more or less the same person, at least we’ll all have someone to talk to while we’re stuck here.”
“That’s right,” his counterpart readily agreed. It’s hard to spin-doctor death, but the young truck driver was trying his best. “I never did double-date while I was alive. It’s strange to think that we’re doing it now that we’re dead.”
Feeling a little better about themselves, the two couples resumed their walk down the beach, chatting animatedly, enjoying the scenery if not their situation. Occasionally, a child or two would run through them, pause as if encountering a strange smell, and then resume whatever play activity they had been engaged in. Children seemed more sensitive than adults to the presence of the departed, Max noted absently.
“This para provides the basis for some interesting speculation.”
“How so, young fella?” The oldster watched a sand flea dig itself a hole at his feet. Under his right foot, to be exact.
“If ghosts exist, and they self-evidently do, and there are such things as para ghosts spending time in Limbo, does that mean there is a Heaven and a Hell? And if so, are there para Heavens and para Hells that likewise differ slightly from one another? Is there a para God, or just one Supreme Being who rules over not only the Universe, but an infinite number of para Universes? If so, can these hypothetical para Gods communicate with one another? After all, if they’re all-powerful, they ought to be able to regulate a simple thing like the Boles Effect. Or are they unaware of one another’s presence? Is there a higher authority or law governing how even God can exist that prevents him from moving between paras, or even knowing of their multiple existence?”
The oldster looked away to study the sea. “Give it a rest, young fella. My head’s starting to hurt tryin’ to follow you.”
Max moved to stand next to him. Foam-flecked water rushed through their ankles. “How do you think mine feels? Sometimes I really think it would be better if I just did go mad.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, young fella.” The old man smiled up at him. “You’re already dead, so your situation can’t get any worse.”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through so far,” Max told him. “Compared to some of it, being deceased isn’t such a bad deal.” He stared, then nodded up the beach. “Here comes a perfect example of what I’m talking about right now.”
There were three sets of the aliens, all matching precisely, all chattering away in their click-cluck tongue. Three sets, and all of them as insubstantial as the two men who stood conversing on the sand.
“Now that’s a new one on me,” the oldster confessed. “What the devil are they?”
“Aliens,” Max explained.
The senior shook his head slowly as he tracked their approach. “Heard about aliens all my life. Didn’t think they existed. Certainly never expected to see one, much less half a dozen. And a bunch of ’em matching up.”
“It’s the Boles Effect.” Looking down, Max watched fingerlings swim between his toes. Also through his toes. “There are para worlds where the aliens have landed and made contact with us. Not only made contact, but established formal relations. In one para they operate a big spaceport up in the hills above Malibu.”
The oldster let out a derisive snort. “Folks up that way been seeing aliens for years.”
“I know, but this isn’t Hollywood hokum. In at least that one para, and probably others, they’re really here. Pretty decent folks, actually. At least, the ones I met were.”
He nodded at the approaching figures. They wore no elaborate robes of elegant otherworldly design this time. Like himself, the old man, and the forlorn newlyweds, the aliens likewise were stark naked. All three sets of them—one original, and two sets of paras. As always, it was impossible to tell the paras from their progenitors.
Para alien ghosts, he thought. At that moment he decided that the Cosmos was ruled by multiple Gods. There would have to be more than one just to keep it all straight. But then, who said that the Cosmos had to be organized? Even for someone who had gone through what he had already experienced, who had seen everything that he had seen, the concept of parallel Chaos was one he found beyond his ability to deal with. The Universe might be a little insane, but it was organized insanity.
Turning to their right, the aliens headed inland. Looking for a crashed ship, maybe, or whatever had been responsible for their demise.
He kicked absently at the sand. His foot passed repeatedly and effortlessly through the glistening grains, despite his most energetic efforts disturbing not a one. “I don’t know if I can go on like this.”
The old man grinned humorlessly. “What are you going to do about it? Kill yourself?”
“Look, it’s not funny,” the reporter responded more sharply than he intended. After all, the old specter was only trying to help.
“Sorry. A sense of humor is one thing you don’t lose when you die. Well, some seem to, but me, I suspect they never had one when they were alive. You find out fast that those ghosts who don’t appreciate a good laugh aren’t worth hanging out with.” He turned to leave.
Max looked up in surprise. “Hey, where are you going?”
The oldster glanced back over his shoulder. “You think I’ve got nothing better to do than haunt around here all day? Well, actually, that’s pretty much the case. But I like to move around. I keep hoping that I’ll find peace, if not contentment, and that I’ll finally depart Limbo for whatever lies beyond. One thing’s for sure: I’m not getting any peace from you.”
Max called after him. “It’s not my job to supply solace to spooks!”
“I got news for you, young fella. You ain’t got a job no more. You ain’t got a purpose to your existence, because you ain’t got no existence. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. So you might as well chill out and lighten up.” His irrepressible grin returned. “Mentally, I mean. Nature’s already taken care of both for you physically.”
The elderly beachcomber was right, of course. Max watched the old man’s figure fade, literally fade, into the mystic golden light where sea and shore merged. Then he turned away, deep in thought.
The situation was not very encouraging. Even if he could make it up the coast back north to Trancas and find Boles, there was no way he could communicate his condition to the scientist’s para in this world. Not that it was likely to matter. As far as he knew and could figure, the device itself worked only on the living.
The beauty of the day gave no indication of diminishing. Since there was nothing he could do to improve his plight, he decided that he might as well enjoy it. Few pleasures besides sight were left to the deceased, but while he could not feel the water, or taste it, or smell it, he could still ride the waves. The deceased surfer had shown that.
Just gossamer. That’s me, he thought. I am less than the breaking spume. By the same token, he did not have to worry about going over the falls or choking on mouthfuls of brine. Since he was already dead, the biggest waves could not hurt him, nor could sharks, stingrays, broken beer cans, or any of the other less salubrious dwellers of the bay.
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sp; Wading out into the deeper water was easy. Instead of holding him back by pushing him toward the beach, the waves exerted only the slightest pressure while passing through him. Being back in the eternal sea buoyed him up and helped to banish any thoughts of trying to walk to China—or anyplace else. He allowed the waves to thrust him gently up and down, up and down, enjoying the movement even though it was otherwise devoid of any sensory input.
He caught one wave and, like a surf-driven gust of wind, rode it all the way into the beach, shooting right through a young girl paddling in circles on her boogie board. Gliding effortlessly back out, he caught a second breaker, and then a third. When the fourth one presented itself he did not hesitate. Where its size and sharp curl would have frightened him previously, now he lay back and let it lift him up, cloudward, and fling him down hard. He made no effort to avoid its pile-driving force as it slammed him toward the bottom, knowing that he would simply drift up and out through the sand as readily as the roiling waters would pass through him.
He came up coughing, sputtering, and soaking wet in the same clothes he had been wearing prior to finding himself a representative of the walking demised. Fighting for air, salt-stung eyes bulging under the churning pressure of the tumbling wave, he kicked hard and pushed himself forward until he broke the surface. Children ceased their playing momentarily to gape at him. Joggers slowed and stared as he dragged himself, gasping and choking, out of the water and up onto dry sand.
“You all right, mister?” The young, bronzed blond surfer who had just entered the water stopped paddling and turned toward him, rising out of the swells while keeping a firm grip on the wrist strap fastened to the front of his board.
Weighted down by his sodden attire and the several ounces of seawater that were sloshing around in the bottom of his lungs, Max struggled to rise. “I’m fine, I’m okay.” He coughed again, regurgitated brine spilling from his lips, and forced himself to smile. “I’m an actor. I’m just rehearsing a part.”
Not entirely convinced, but willing to accept the explanation, the youth turned and aimed his fiberglass chariot out to sea. It was not a rationale that would have been swallowed in Dubuque, but this was L.A.
“Yeah, right. Method drowning.” He shook his head sadly. “Actors. You’re all crazy.” In seconds he was gone, shooting rocketlike through a breaking wave, intent on spending as much of his waking life as possible engaged in riding a flat slab of painted fiberglass back and forth, back and forth, over a single short stretch of ocean.
Once safely clear of the water, a dazed Max collapsed on the sand. Sitting up, he turned to face the sea so that he would not have to meet the stares of the curious. Salt stung his throat, acrid water clogged his lungs, the sun burned his eyes, his muscles ached, his wet clothes hung heavily from his skin, and he was starting to stink like old laundry. It was divine.
He was alive again—but in what para?
There was no sign of the old ghost, or the commiserating couples, or the bemused aliens. When a chill ran down his back, he looked around sharply, half expecting to see a transcendent, spectral figure making its way inland. But it was only the sea wind evaporating water from his saturated shirt.
They were still around, he knew. Not necessarily the diverse group of revenants he had conversed with, but others. They had always been there, always would be there. He had learned a great truth about the afterlife by momentarily becoming a part of it.
Not that anyone would believe him if he chose to try and share it in an article, of course. He, who had written story after story making fun of and debunking earnest believers in the hereafter, and in the existence of spectral beings, did not have the kind of byline that would engender respect for such subject matter. Having temporarily, or temporally, been one such phantom himself, he would no longer be able to write about such matters with quite the same skeptical, jaundiced eye.
In fact, he reflected, the dead were very much like me and thee, except that they did not take up space in lines waiting to get into the latest movie, or appear on TV talk shows to discuss their predicament, or vote in annual elections—except in Alabama. No, the deceased were regular folks whose company, based on what he had seen, was in many ways preferable to that of the living.
A second chill sparked a response in his lungs, and then in his sinuses, disclosing itself by means of a loud, sharp sneeze. If I don’t get out of these wet clothes, he thought, I’m liable to take a real, good, old-fashioned, unpleasant cold. Then pneumonia might set in, he reflected, and he would die. Again.
Climbing to his feet, he turned and started off in the direction of his apartment building. Providentially, his wallet and keys were still in their respective pockets. Like many of his friends, he wore tight pants not only for appearance’s sake but because it made life more difficult for the professional pickpockets who often infested the coastal beach communities on warm, crowded days such as this. Everything important in his wallet was either plastic or laminated, and he never carried much cash, so his temporary saltwater bath should not have done him any great harm. His only concern was that the car and apartment keys might corrode.
The joy and delight of finding himself among the living was tempered by the realization that, while his immediate situation had changed for the better, his own personal reality was in all likelihood still in a state of unpredictable flux. Unless something concrete proved the contrary, he was compelled to believe that he was still under the influence of the Boles Effect and thus still subject to its whims. The field continued to be a gigantic, imperceptible monkey on his back.
How could he plan for any kind of tomorrow, much less just live, without any way of knowing what tomorrow was going to be like? Certain paras were more or less similar and familiar, but others, such as the ones in which he found himself among visiting aliens, or walking the surface of a devastated planet, or conversing with the dead, left him feeling unsettled mentally as well as physically.
In many ways the near identical paras were even more disturbing than the radically different. Easy enough to know that the field was still operative and his life still in uncontrollable flux when the world was full of Elder Gods or utopian Eloi-like teens. Much harder when the only difference might lie in the design of a ketchup bottle or the subtle rearrangement of an unfamiliar constellation, or the water in the toilet flowing counterclockwise. If the latter, how could he tell for certain if he was in yet another para, or just in Perth?
As he left the dry, hot sand for the parking lot that separated Appian Way from the beach, he found himself watching the too-rapid passage of a heavy delivery truck with morbid interest. How easy it would be to step in front of the next oversized vehicle that came barreling along, its driver intent on his schedule and distracted by the beauty of sea and sky. An instant of disorientation, a few seconds of shocking pain, and it would all be over: no more soul-shattering confrontations to deal with, no more trying to figure out if he was back in his world or in some subtly different doppelgänger, no more having to deal with cultures that he would never have the opportunity to interact with for more than a day or two.
Of course, he might return for an indeterminate period of time as a ghost, but at least he would know that he was haunting the right world, his world. All it would take to put an end to his wanderings was a single step, a final closing of the eyes, one brief moment of sickening impact…
Unless he didn’t die, but instead suffered only painful, crippling injuries. That would not be a way to ride out the rest of existence in his own world, much less while jumping between unpredictable multiples. But the temptation to give up, to throw in the towel, to bite the bullet, to rid himself of the ongoing cliché of a thoroughly unpredictable future, was tempting. Except…
He had never been a quitter. When his high-school English teacher had told him his spelling and grammar bordered on the atrocious, he had persevered. When his university professors insisted repeatedly that he had no talent for writing whatsoever, he had persevered. When interviewer
after interviewer had told him that his work was colorful and catchy but had nothing to say, he had persevered.
No wonder he had been able to land a plum job at a nationally distributed tabloid.
He straightened a little. If he could handle being dead, he could survive anything. Already he had dealt with maleficent Elder Gods and enigmatic aliens. Let the Boles Effect continue to make origami of his reality. He would cope with whatever resulted.
People always needed, always wanted, to know what was happening around them. That had been a constant in every para he had visited. Wherever he was, there would be a market for his reportorial talents. He would make a life for himself even if that life changed without warning every day, or week, or month. A stable existence it might not be, possibly the most unstable in the entire history of humankind, but he would press on. After all, where there was life, there was hope, and in his case, perhaps an infinite number of hopes.
He would not give in. If Barrington Boles would continue to work on the problem, so would Max. Perhaps in another para, he thought optimistically, Boles had already solved the problem. Even now, a hundred para Maxes might be returning home from the inventor’s hilltop lab secure in the knowledge that they would no more be roaming the prairies of parallelity.
Unless his Barrington Boles was the only one, out of all those millions of para Boleses, who had actually succeeded in making his device work. In which case it was up to Max to wait until he was certain he was back in that same world before he again confronted the inventor.
Reaching the far side of the parking lot, he climbed the short concrete stairway and paused on the sidewalk up top. Paused and waited, until there was no traffic in sight. Then he crossed carefully, fumbling in his sodden pocket for his slick, cold keys.
When they fit the lock to his building, and neither building nor lock metamorphosed into something unimaginable, he felt, however falsely, much encouraged.
It was a sensation that another long, hot shower greatly intensified. Amazing, he thought, what effect a simple civilized luxury like a hot shower can have on someone’s emotions. As he showered, he forced himself to relax. The soap did not turn into something alive that scampered out of his hand, the water did not turn to acid, or tomato juice, and the fresh towel with which he dried himself retained the weft and softness of which its manufacturer boasted in an exclusive, overpriced mail-order catalog.