“Series forty-one, insertion three,” DeCandyle said. Click.
The gurney was rolling and we were pushed into a small chamber. I felt rather than heard a door close just behind my head: a softer click. I panicked but Sorel clutched my hand and the smell of atropine and formaldehyde filled the air. I felt myself falling—no, rising, with Sorel, linked, hand in hand, toward the light. This time we went more slowly and I saw our bodies laid out, spinning, naked as the day we were born. We rose into the lattice of light and it parted around us like a song.
And it was gone.
All around was the gray darkness.
We were on the Other Side.
I felt nothing. It filled me. I was frozen.
Sorel’s presence now had a form; she who had been all light was all flesh. I find it impossible to describe even though I was to paint it several times. She had legs but they were strangely segmented; breasts but not the breasts my lips and fingers knew; her hands were blunt, her face was blank and her hips and what I can only call her mind were bone-white. She moved away into the gray distance and I moved with her, still linked “hand” to “hand.”
I felt—I knew—I had always been dreaming and only this was real. The space around me was a blank and endless gray. “Life” had been a dream; this was all there was.
I drifted. I seemed to have a body again, although it was not in my control. For hours, centuries, eternities we drifted through a world as small as a coffin, yet never reached an end. At the still center of it all was a circle of stones.
I followed Sorel down toward them. Somebody—or something—was inside.
Waiting.
She passed through the stones toward the Other, pulling me with her. I pushed back; then pulled away, filled with terror. For I had touched stone. Nothing here was real and yet—I had touched stone. Suddenly I knew I was awake because everything was dark, only I could no longer see.
Beside me was her body; its dead hand clutching mine. I had never before awakened—retrocuted—before Sorel. I reached up with my left hand, fearfully, tentatively, until I felt the lid of my coffin just where I knew it would be. It was porcelain or steel, not stone. But cold as stone.
I tried to scream but there was no air. Before I could scream there was a shock, and I fell into another, a darker, darkness.
“What you felt was the roof of the C-T chamber,” DeCandyle was saying. “It enables you to remain in LAD space longer without damage to the home tissue. And with ultrasonic blood cooling, to cross directly to the Other Side.” It was the first time I had heard the term yet I knew immediately what he meant.
Someone was clutching my right hand; it was Sorel. She was still dead. I was lying on the gurney; it rocked on its wheels as I struggled to sit up.
I shuddered as I remembered. “Before I touched the lid, while I was still dead, I touched stone.”
DeCandyle went on: “Apparently there are realms in LAD space whose accessibility depends on residual electrical fields in the home tissue.” I waited for the click, which never came, and realized he was talking only to me.
“There is a magnetic polarity in the body that endures for several days after death. We want to find out what happens as the electrical field decays. The C-T chamber allows us to explore this without waiting on the actual mortification of the flesh.”
Mortification. “So there’s dead and then there’s deader.”
“Something like that. Let me drive you home.”
I was still holding Sorel’s hand. I pried my fingers loose.
I couldn’t sleep. The horror of the Gray Realm (as I was to call it in a painting) kept leaking back in. I felt like a man halfway up the Amazon, afraid to go on but afraid to turn back, because no matter what horrors lay ahead, he knows too well the horror that lies behind. The Devil’s Island of blindness.
I ached for Sorel. We blind are said to be connoisseurs of masturbation, perhaps because our imaginations are so practiced at summoning up images. Afterward, I turned on the lights and tried to paint. I always work in the light.
Painting is a collaboration between the artist and his materials. I know paint loves light; I figure canvas at least likes it.
But it was no good. I couldn’t work. It wasn’t till after dawn, amid the harsh din of the awakening birds, that I realized what was bothering me.
I was jealous.
My ex came by a day early (I thought) to drop off some microwavables. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I was trying to call you all day.”
“I was at the university on Monday, as usual,” I said.
“I’m talking about Tuesday.”