Requiem for a Dead Guy

The fittingest tribute that ever was made to a self-made man such as myself were the words inscribed posthumously on my forehead by the pack of two goons who gunned me down, rifled my pockets and then inscribed words into my forehead using a cunning pen-knife one of them had discovered in my breast pocket - black ink with serrated blade.

That knife had been given to me by a traveling evangelist. I idly recalled this man as my soul - looking down at the two goons crouching over my body, straining to see past them to make out the words being carved, fighting to keep its attention on what was happening to what used to be me - found itself unable to resist the deep, slow pull that had me twisting away from the scene and towards the light. The evangelist had shown up on my doorstep, selling penknives. The penknives were a sideline to his main sales pitch, which was salvation.

"Brother," he said, "either you're saved, or you never were saved and never can be saved - because so it was foreordained, from back before the very foundations of time were laid down. So which is it?"

"Which is what?"

"Are you saved or are you not saved?"

"If I'm saved, do I get a free penknife?"

We had a good long talk, and in the end, I got my penknife.

As I drifted further from what had been my life, I looked down, shading spectral eyes with a transparent hand. "Damn." "That light is BRIGHT," I thought.

Oddly, my thoughts were audible to me now. "Hey." I thought. "I can hear my own thoughts." "COOL!" "I wonder can I hear the thoughts of those two guys?" But they had receded into a gathering mist, and it was not easy to turn my spectral head back in that direction. I was drifting away. By now I was several feet above the slick cobblestones of Bartlett Place, drifting slowly up but mostly south.

"I seem to be heading south."

I continued to drift a while.

"Santa's at the North Pole, maybe heaven's in Antarctica!"

This was funny, or at any rate, I began giggling uncontrollably. Part of it was the utterly deadpan tone with which my audible thoughts were expressing themselves. Part of it was probably the weirdness of the situation.

The mist continued to thicken - not gray, but white in the blind glare of the light streaming from above. The light was streaming from a gap or a rent in the sky. I did not seem to be heading straight for it, but it kept pace above me as I continued drifting slowly up, but mostly south. By now the shapes of the buildings that loomed left and right ("east and west!" my mind supplied) were less visible than sensed. I adjudged I was about seven or eight feet above the street. I could barely see it, or anything below me. Even the traffic lights seemed to be gradually shifting into a different visible spectrum.

Inexorable, I drifted.

"Inexorable, I drifted," I mused in stentorian tones.

"This is kind of nice," I thought. "Like lying in a hammock."

I wondered about gravity and orientation, then I wondered wordlessly at the difference between "...the thoughts that are audible and the thoughts that...aren't...?" "Wait!" Hm.

"I guess it's just the ones where you think in words."

The light was more bearable now, more pleasant. It didn't seem any less bright, but I guessed my spectral pupils had contracted.

The mist was now less mist and more clouds. Yet no blue sky anywhere - the sky behind the clouds, glimpsed between gaps, was like a smooth silver curtain. With here and there, a star. Like a pinhole.

"Hm. Are those stars?"

"I don't think that's actually the sky."

A thought dawned that maybe the stars were tiny, distant rents in the sky, under which distant souls were slowly drifting.

"I'm going to try as hard as I can to head towards one of those."

"Concentrate."

"'Concentrate!'"

"CON-CEN-TRATE."

No effect. No dice.

I continued drifting, slowly up but mostly south.