Police Report

I went down to the local police station one morning to report that my wife was being tormented by the Devil.  Naturally, the cops there were more than a little skeptical.  They just kicked back in their creaky wooden desk chairs, scratching their bellies and listening complacently to my story.  I caught a couple of them shaking their heads and exchanging incredulous glances.  They all assumed my wife was crazy.  The warm smell of a fresh pot of coffee hung in the air.

The old brick apartment building where we lived sat on the far corner of the same intersection that the police station sat on.  The building could be seen from the station's window.  I pointed up at it.  "I know for a fact that six other residents have come down here to file complaints.  I suppose they're all lying!?  They're all crazy?"  The cops stared back impassively.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  I didn't want to admit it, but I had to say it.  "I know they're not crazy.  I know...because I've been hearing it too.  Day and night.  That voice, it never stops."

The moment I said that, everything just stopped.  The cops sat like wax figures.  They had gone from bored to deathly still.  One of them sat with their chair frozen in mid-tip.  Then, a man who had been sitting at a desk across the room with his back to me, slowly swiveled to face me.  He looked like an ordinary enough man, but I knew instantly who it was.  A grin spread across his face and he said, "Of course you do.", and then he laughed and laughed and laughed.

Grotesques

Apparently a childhood memory.  I was about three or four, and I was staying up to watch some movie on late night TV.  The movie was called Visage, and it was about this 17th century painter who would paint his subjects by reflecting their faces through a series of mirrors.  By adjusting the angles of the different mirrors, he could distort the faces in a variety of different ways.  The movie opened with a montage of these distorted-face paintings.  Some had one eye.  Some had gaping, twisted mouths.  They were all quite revolting and disturbing.  Then it dawned on me that this was why I had frequently had nightmares about seeing a movie with disturbing faces in it.  It was all drawing on this memory of this movie I had seen as a child.

Point of Departure

Downtown in Cleveland somewhere.  There were crowds of people filling the streets everywhere.  It was impossible to even consider trying to drive through these crowds, so my wife and I decided to park the car in a small lot behind a run-down brick building and continue on foot.  I griped that it was way too far to walk, but my wife assured me that we'd be there before we knew it.  We turned the corner onto a wide main street which sloped down away from us.  From the high ground I could see a vast river of people stretched out before me, channeled by the banks formed by the tall buildings on either side.  There was a constant roar of excited chatter, and there were even streamers and confetti in the air above everyone's heads, along with that strange, dizzy haze that's caused by a large mob of people.

Before long, this river of people carried us down by the docks along the lakefront.  There were several boats anchored alongside one another.  The crowds poured up the ramps to the different boats.  I noted with some relief that the ramps were quite easily accessible, not as narrow and precarious as some I'd seen.  We seemed to instinctively know which boat was ours, and we headed eagerly up the ramp.  At the top, I could see out over the lake.  Some of the boats were already loaded and on the water.  The setting sun was half-dipped in the lake and huge on the horizon.  I turned to my wife.  A warm breeze blew through.  I had no idea where we were going.

Scene from a Beach

I was standing on the beach.  It was 6:30 in the morning, but somehow life wasn't catching up with this place until 8 AM.  Things had to be prepared.  We had to lay all the beach towels down.  We had to find just the right random scattering of people, just the right kids to chase each other with buckets of sand and water.  A precise number of seagulls were brought in trucks, and then released from their cages.  Finally, someone had to go up into the light house and turn this old metal crank that would put the sun exactly in the 8 o'clock position in the sky over the water.  So, everything was set; everyone was in their place.  I looked down at my pocket watch as the last seconds of 7:59 ticked by.  Everything was still.  Even the birds waited.  Then, the second that 8 o'clock arrived, it all slid silently into motion, and the elegant machinery of life continued along in its smooth, eternal waltz.

The Flipside

I died.  I collapsed in a spot on the wooden floor of the dining room where a sunbeam cast the shape of the window on the floor.  I discovered that death was merely a doorway between two dimensions, as my eyes fluttered and I came to on the floor in the same spot where I had died.  It was the same world everywhere, but quieter.  I was just out of phase with the living, but still occupying the same space.  My loved ones who'd died were there to greet me instead.  They had been among us all along.

One peculiarity of being out of phase was that it was impossible to use electricity.  It seemed that the proper polarities didn't operate correctly in this dimension.  As a result, we had no radio, no TV, no phone or internet.  This helped explain why it was no easy task for the dead to contact the living.  We sat around playing cards a lot, and drinking coffee that had been heated over a fire someone had built in the yard outside.

It was all very peaceful actually.  There was no traffic or noise around.  I didn't really see anyone else beside our small group, but I knew they had to be out there.  Imagine all the famous people who had died, just hanging out somewhere! In time we would go visiting some of them, but there was no hurry.  There was a vast sense of relief in the air.  A lifetime of fretting over death was all behind us.  There was nothing more to worry about.  We could finally relax.

There was work for us to do, though.  We had what my family called "missions."  One of them took us to a racetrack one afternoon.  The stands and the track were deserted, but that was only in our dimension.  On the other side, it was packed with people.  You could almost sense the excitement they generated in the air, like an echo without the noise that created it.  We climbed up into the empty stands.  We went to a certain row and waited.  Suddenly my father reached out and caught something out of mid-air that seemed as though it were about to fall 50 feet to the ground below.  I could almost make out one of my nieces before my father pushed her back and she was gone.  "She isn't ready to come here yet.  They're not ready to lose her.", he explained to me.  I looked out across the sunny deserted racetrack, and mourned for the living.