23.

Like when the car hit me, there’s no pain.

But there is a sudden sense of shearing, of weight falling from me until all the aches of being almost fifty, the pain in my foot and leg, the tiredness in my body, and the inebriation in my head, shred, like they’re nothing more than tissue paper holding me, and I’m immersed in a thick grey mist.

And I see everything because, as the cliché goes, it’s almost like life flashing before my eyes, but instead it’s a rapid recount: my birth; running happily around as a kid; school and my first teacher, am amputee without a right hand, which freaked me; the time my second grade teacher kept me in during recess to help clean up, and remarked to me how immature the other kids were as they charged out, and me feeling so adult because she confided that in me; moving house, and struggling to make new friends; feeling already so out of place; developing friends through primary school, and a scattering of melancholy; anxiety through my teens, and feeling disconnected from everybody around me, like this was life I couldn’t, and didn’t, know how to engage in; finding some solace in creativity; clusters of panic attacks when I was nineteen, the equivalent of a nervous breakdown; hospitals, doctors, meds; finding some independence and working as a bartender, while shaking the meds; a couple of years of normalcy; inexplicably, a panic attack again while working, and one that led to more meds and five years of agoraphobia, of living as a shut-in; a social service doctor examining me to qualify me for a pension disability, somebody who was cynical and had no doubt seen lots of fakers, but who looked at the wreck I was until I could read his face, could read that he was thinking of me, This poor fuck; writing while I was shut-in; friends moving forward with their lives, living, marrying, buying houses and shit, while I remained a prisoner of my own mental health; slowly, tentatively, finding my way back into the world on antidepressants that had horrific side effects, but which I bore because at least they were nullifying the mental health shit; writing, and accumulating thousands of rejections; Lana, who I knew in school, and I hooking up, even though she had a kid, and my family frowned on walking into such a relationship, while her own family thought I was worthless due to my circumstances, so Lana always separated them from me; studying again; meeting Autumn, as this totally radical contrast to everything I’d every known; working freelance as an editor, and being lauded as naturally gifted, bust losing myself in something pedestrian, something that dulled me; being hit by a car, and pitched two years into the hospital system with rehab involving pain meds, physio, hydro, chronic pain workshops, a hospital psychologist, and learning I would never recover fully, which seemed a metaphor for my life; writing, writing, writing, vowing I was going to fucking make it; gaining employ with Gainsboro Press, and feeling like my life finally, belatedly, was taking the shape it should’ve in my twenties; my first book accepted and published, and feeling like my life was finally taking off; running workshops, and mentoring young writers who, inexplicably, looked at me like I knew what I was doing; trying with Lana, but never measuring up to her expectations, and doubting myself; my friendship with Autumn, and the bond I developed because she listened to me, and never condemned me, and always encouraged me to exceed my expectations; my first book underperforming, and my second not being given the chance it should, and ultimately it bombed; working at Gainsboro, and feeling everything closing down on me; feeling that hopefulness that imbued me in my forties, when I got work, when I got published, when I got Lana, transforming into hopelessness; life becoming a habit; those suicidal thoughts, always wafting through my life, occasionally demanding my attention, until it became my normal; life becoming a grinding routine, that always resisted me when I tried to change it; feeling separation from Lana, and never knowing if it was because of her ruthlessness and expectation that I live to her standards, or because I was divorcing myself from ideals that I believed we once shared; my publisher, rejecting every book I submitted for my third book; thinking, How have I gotten here? without knowing how to get away; and then the train.

I should’ve probably mentioned this stuff earlier.

 

24.

The mist clears around me, until it forms into four walls of eddying grey that hint at shadows and lights behind them, although I don’t know if that’s just my imagination still firing away spasmodically, the way it does when I’m drifting off to sleep and think I see things, or hear things – products of a mind falling into sleep and gearing up dream imagery before consciousness has fully been relinquished.

I’m sitting at a chair in a table – just a simple wooden chair at a simple wooden table. I place my hand on the tabletop and feel the timbre – something like pine, although the varnish is worn, particularly here in the middle. Lots of hands have been here – I know that much.

I peer under the table (nothing), and when I straighten up, there’s somebody sitting opposite me – a thin, pale (almost albino) woman in an oversized suit, red tie dragged down from an unbuttoned collar, with cropped blonde hair and a nose ring in her left nostril. It’s hard to guess her age, although it’s not because there’s any mysticism behind it – I’m just terrible at guessing ages. Forty, maybe.

“Suicide, huh?” she says, her voice gravelly, like she’s had a pack-a-day habit for thirty years.

Her eyes are peculiarly washed out – at once grey or blue depending on how the light catches them, but a tint that’s hardly distinguishable from the whites of the eyes. It’s nothing that otherworldly, though, although I don’t know how to describe it.

“I’m Luca.”

“What are you? Who are you?”

“For the purpose of this you can just think of me as a facilitator,” Luca says.

“A facilitator for what?”

“Here’re your choices,” she says. “Go through Door Number One onto whatever’s next.”

The rectangle of a door darkens in the grey mist right behind her.

“What’s next?” I ask.

“Don’t know. Never been there. Or you can take Door Number Two,” another door darkens to the right of the first, “where we retire you.”

“Retire me?”

“You can’t handle life,” she says. “What makes you think you can, or deserve, or should, handle the afterlife?”

“What’s retire me mean?”

“You’re done. Dispersed. Everything’s gone.”

As much as I wanted that when I was living, I don’t want it now that I’m not. Something else fills me here. I don’t want to say hope, because that’s trite. It’s not hope. But it’s something more – possibility. That may be a better way to describe it, although I don’t think it’s new. It’s just something that’s emerged now that the asphyxiation of life isn’t smothering the fuck out of it.

“And Door Number Three,” she says, “is go back, and get another shot at this.”

“Another shot?”

“You’ve hit the reset switch,” Luca says. “But there are costs. You go back, you’ll forget one thing.”

“What?”

Luca shrugs. “Could we be where you left your car keys. Could be how to speak. Could be somebody in your life. Some of this is re-discoverable. Like you could find your keys. Or you could learn to speak all over. But some of it’s not. It’s just,” she clicks her fingers theatrically, “gone.”

“Why?”

“Because we can’t reset with the way you are. It doesn’t work that way. You won’t fit. We need to make a deviation, an allowance.”

“Who’s we?”

Luca shrugs again. “Don’t know. The people who do this shit. I just fucking sit here, knowing what I’ve gotta do. They don’t tell me much more than that.”

“And what happens if I relive it?”

“It won’t be exact – thought is the definition of reality. You’ll be going back, but you know all this now, you know what your immediate future holds – reality has to redefine around your thoughts. Nothing drastic. It’s not like you’ll find yourself the King of Scandinavia, but little things may change – may. I’m guessing your thoughts don’t amount to much. Turd.”

“ Is it like an alternate—”

“Fuck no. Why the fuck would we indulge you, you prick? It’s just a reset. You’ll be you, except for the thing you’ve forgotten, and you’ll be fitting …” Luca points – a glowing white circle appears above us, about the side of her fist. “Your birth.” Then spraying out from that, like a scattering of confetti, a myriad of yellow, orange and red dots. “Fuck. This how many times you’ve thought about suicide? All those? Technically, you go back to when it first occurred to you, but I see this could be a problem with you. Cunt.”

“Why’re you talking to me like this?”

“Like what? You dick.”

“Like that.”

“Because I give this speech so often it bores me. You bore me. You found this loophole. This reset. And you don’t deserve it. That’s why whoever designed this shit inserted that forgetting thing.” Luca chuckles. “I saw one guy forget his child. Only thing he loved – his daughter. Marriage went to shit. Business went bankrupt. Health was struggling. But he went back for her. And could no longer remember her. Broke her heart. She thought he’d had a stroke or some shit – knocked out that particular memory. So now he fucked her life. Again. And his own. Because he went back for her. Now he’s meandering down there without a clue about her, and she’s worse than if he’d just stayed dead.”

“But I’ll remember everything else? That I was already there, the things I did—”

“Yeah. Prick.”

“And the thing I forget—?”

“I told you it could be anything. You could forget to tie your shoelaces. If you know one billion things in your life, it could be any one of those things. Saw one woman forget her Grade Two teacher’s name – useless information that didn’t matter. So I don’t know. I can’t tell you. Only thing I can tell you is if you reset again, whatever you’ve forgotten stays forgotten.”

“I can reset again?”

“Uh huh. It’s like some existential Groundhog Day. But it’s not. You’re gonna think this is a game, some light-hearted romp, some cuntabulous whim.”

“It’s a punishment—?”

“It’s whatever you make it. Prick. Here’s the one rule to remember: if you reset again, you can’t use the same means. No more trains.”

“What if I do—?”

“Door Number Two. Bye, bye. Nothing. By the way, did you think about how you probably traumatised that driver for the rest of his life? Cunt. Poor sop’s going to be seeing splattering your sorry carcass every time he closes his eyes. You dumb motherfucker.”

“Can you stop that?”

“Stop what? Wanker.”

“The name-calling.”

“We’ll stop right here, okay? Dick. Just tell me what it’s gonna be. One of the doors or you want to go back.”

“If I go through one of the doors—”

“I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know anything.”

“Any other rules I should know about?”

“You tell anybody this has happened …”

“Yeah?”

“They’ll probably have you committed.”

“Thanks.”

“Decide. Wanker. This has already gone longer than it should’ve.”

Years ago, when I was going through one of my worst bouts with depression, I read a lot about spirituality.

One tenet that appealed to me was before we’re born, we agree to take on the problems we’ll face as a means of spiritual growth, and if we don’t overcome those problems, if we don’t learn and grow, we’ll just face those problems again in the next life. That made more sense to me than religion – this cyclical evolution, because that’s life.

Leaves bloom, wither, die, and do it all over again. Trees and plants shed seeds, so new trees and plants grow. People have kids, and imbue them with their values, and the kids move forward and do it all over again. The day dawns, then passes into night, then dawns again. Everything organic has some sort of a cyclical nature, so if we do have souls, that evolving would be a natural mechanism.

But this isn’t a problem I learned from. This isn’t something I overcame. In the parlance of all those books I read by people like Brian Weiss and Michael Newton and James van Praagh (and none of my interpretation or what I’m doing is meant to impugn them, or their work, so if there’s any bastardisation in my recount, it’s my responsibility, not theirs), I’m just going to come back and face all this shit again, just without any foreknowledge.

Here’s this weird shortcut, and it buoys me with hope I don’t think I’ve ever felt.

“Ha,” Luca says. “So, you think your story’s worth telling again? You think it’s gonna be better?” She snorts. “Just about all of you make the same decision. Fucking assclowns.”

“All of us—”

“Talk time’s done, dickhead. Although I’m sure we’ll talk again.” Luca raises her hands. “Ones like you, you think this is a game and you don’t want to run the risk of washing out. You think this is a blessing.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s what you make it. Thought defines reality. Cunt.”

“What does—”

She clicks her fingers.

And then it’s done.

I’m—