Daryl came to himself suddenly. It could not be said that he awoke precisely, because he knew he hadn’t been asleep. He became aware of his surroundings almost immediately, in stark contrast to the way he woke up on most mornings. There was no slow climb to consciousness, or the horrible feeling of peaceful oblivion lost as the tidal waters of sleep receded for the day, leaving behind only the faintest hint of true contentment in their wake. He had no idea where he had been until now, but now he knew that he was here, and that was something.
He looked around and saw that he was in a simple room with brown wooden chairs against the walls and end tables stacked with magazines. The paint wasn’t quite gray but it wasn’t quite white either. There was soothing artwork on the walls, impressionist vistas with apple orchards and meandering rivers, illuminated by soft recessed lighting in the ceiling. Ahead of him, behind him and to his left were three walls with chairs arranged neatly against each, and to his right was a small window, behind which sat a desk, behind which sat a pleasantly plump woman who looked to be in her mid forties. She was looking at him and smiling.
The room washed over him like a warm breeze on a summer day. The details of his surroundings were mildly interesting to him, but he felt no particular desire to move or explore. The walls were almost a tan color, he decided. Part of his mind noted with some interest that there was no door in this room, but this did not trouble him. How he had arrived here was unimportant, because he had always been here. He was also aware that he had never been here before, and did not remember arriving here, but that was all right, too. Okey-dokey. No problema. Always, never. No difference.
He crossed his right leg over his left and laced his hands together on his lap. Then he switched his legs and crossed his left over his right, replacing his hands and leaning back into his chair. This was really quite comfortable, Daryl thought placidly. This was just where he had always wanted to be. A question floated through his mind, but he couldn’t quite get a handle on it. It drifted past inconsequentially. Perhaps the color of the paint on the walls was called “taupe”. He’d heard that word before but didn’t really know what it represented. He could read a magazine if he wanted. There was a whole stack right there. National Geographics and Smithsonians, by the look. The only magazines that ever got his attention in waiting rooms. There were no home and garden magazines or automobile magazines. Nothing offering make-up tutorials or tips for a slimmer waist. That was just fine. Yes, fine as wine. He giggled a little to himself. It felt nice, so he giggled some more.
This felt like a pleasant overdose of nitrous oxide, the famed gas of laughter from the friendly neighborhood dentist. That was the feeling he was having now, he realized, and it gave him no cause for alarm, no more than it had in the dentist’s office in days gone by as he stared up into the clear green eyes of the pretty dental assistant. So he was a little high. That was nice. It was actually pretty funny, truth be told. He giggled some more, delighting in the feeling. He looked around the room again, searching idly for some signifying markings to tell him where he was. Finding none, he stopped looking. The part of his consciousness that wanted to find something was relatively at peace, certainly not raising any alarms, and so he let it work on its own, enjoying the peace he felt in his heart and mind in the meanwhile.
The question that had floated by earlier drifted through his awareness once more, this time a little more distinctly. He was forgetting something. He wiggled his toes. He was wearing what looked to be leather-bound sandals like Roman senators had in old paintings. Really just a leather sole strapped to his foot. That was a bit odd. He really wasn’t the sandal-wearing type, when it came right down to it. He’d never seen anything like them in a store, and didn’t remember buying sandals of any kind in the recent past.
Now, there was something odd. The recent past. What could he remember about the recent past, exactly? There was something to think about, Inspector, he thought with a jolly good humor. The Caper of the Recent Past. He giggled some more. Yes, Inspector, I believe you’re right about that, there’s something smelly here and I think it’s fish. Yes, something’s fishy here, sergeant, absotively posilutely! He planted both feet on the floor and drummed on his knees lightly with his fingers. Ba-ba ba- da-da, ba-da-da! Stars and Stripes Forever, my good man! Be kind to your fine feathered friends, for a duck may be somebody’s—
Mother. His mother. She was going to be sad.
Now why would he think a thing like that? What did anyone have to be sad about? Why, everything was going just perfectly! He was exactly where he wanted to be, and everything was exactly as it should have been. Yesterday, today, and forever. Besides, his mother couldn’t be sad, his mother was--
Dead.
This was a bit concerning, now. His thoughts were becoming a tad jumbled. His sense of utter contentment began to wear thin in a couple of places, like a dense fog with brief breaks that allowed further sight for a few moments before snatching them away again. A brass band in his mind struck up the brash beginnings of Stars and Stripes Forever in the slight pause, and he was once again drumming on his legs and chortling away to himself.
He looked over at the girl, no, woman, behind the desk. For a moment she had looked younger, he thought. But as he looked he saw that he had been mistaken. She was as he had originally seen. Mid-forties. Woman. Not a girl. She was still smiling a pleasant smile at him. Her hair was short and brown. No signs of gray yet. Her teeth were very straight. He smiled back, nodding and returning to the overture playing itself out in his mind, but then the question that had been drifting just out of reach collided with him full-force and the band ground to a halt.
Where had he parked his car?
It was such a simple question, so benign in its phrasing and mundanity, that he almost dismissed it again in spite of the jarring force with which it had struck him. What did it matter where he had parked? Just outside in the parking lot, surely. It was not as though he would be lost if he went outside when he was done with... this... well, whatever it was he was doing. The brass band nearly began another thundering round of instrumentation advising him on the treatment of his fowl-bodied fellows and the particulars of their familial relationships when another question trickled through a widening crack in the levy of his calm.
What was he going to have for dinner?
As myriad menu choices flitted through his mind, he thought again of his car. Then of his mother, and then the duration of his time in this pleasant waiting room. He realized that he didn’t have answers to any of these questions, not a single one. He realized he had no memory of coming here and no understanding of why he was here.
And just like that, the dam that he suddenly knew had been holding back a reservoir of disturbance and maybe even some good-natured panic broke completely. His arms fell to his sides in the chair and he sat bolt upright. He looked around the room in surprise, seeing everything for the first time. He looked over at the calm woman behind the counter and saw an expression of compassion and empathy underlying the beatific smile. She nodded at him, encouraging, and he opened his mouth to speak. Then he snapped it shut. He didn’t know what to ask. The enormity of his predicament was too large. The only things he knew for sure were that his name was Daryl and that he was wearing someone else’s shoes.
As he thought that, though, he realized it wasn’t true. His name wasn’t Daryl at all. It was Benjamin. He knew that, then. He had indeed been called Daryl for a lifetime, it was true, but it wasn’t really his name. That had only been the name his mother had given him. But she had made it up when he was born, perhaps only weeks before his birth. It meant nothing more than that.
He looked back to the woman behind the desk and cleared his throat. “Um,” he began, bravely, he thought. “I can’t remember where I parked my car.” He could think of no better opener.
She raised her eyebrows and said, “Did you arrive here by car?”
This was an interesting question. He found as before that he had no memory of his arrival, or indeed of any event since… since… when, exactly? That was an excellent question for the Inspector, wasn’t it? What, in fact, could he remember about his recent activities?
He frowned. “I also don’t know what I’m going to have for dinner.”
“Are you hungry?”
This was growing a bit tired already, this insistence upon answering questions with questions that she had thus far demonstrated. He had never been much a fan of the Socratic method in any setting, and it felt particularly mean-spirited in his current circumstance, whatever that turned out to be. She surely had information that would help him, and she was deliberately withholding it.
“Now, look,” he began, rising to his feet. As he did so he noticed that he didn’t seem to be wearing his customary pair of jeans. There was no snug, comforting feeling of denim encasing his thighs and calves. He looked down in surprise and saw that he was, in fact, not wearing pants at all, but appeared instead to be clad in someone’s bedsheet. There was a sash tied around his waist, and his arms inhabited large drooping sleeves that radiated out from what he could only call a toga. This derailed him quite a bit, and his comforting sense of growing indignation left, replaced almost immediately by the same feeling of bewilderment that had been his companion for the past three minutes.
He looked up at the woman behind the desk. She was smiling kindly. The paintings on the walls soothed at him imperturbably.
“I… well, what is this place?” he asked.
“It looks like a waiting room,” she said.
“It does, yes.” It did. “How did I come to be here?”
She gazed at him. “What’s the last thing you can remember doing?”
He thought for a long moment. “I can remember making a sandwich,” he said weakly.
She raised her eyebrows.
“And then… I was… I can’t remember.” He looked around the room again, as if to ground himself. “There’s no door in this room.”
The woman behind the desk spoke softly. “Because you can’t see your way out until you find out how you got here in the first place.”
He squinted at her name tag. “Is your name Marcy? Or Maizy? I can’t see it right.” It looked like it was changing before his eyes.
“I suppose it could be either. Which would you like it to be?”
This was such a disarming question that he had no response for several seconds. What did that matter? What possible bearing did his preference have on her name? What a strange question. This whole thing was getting to be a little too much. His mind was reeling with the implications of this predicament. He started to feel nauseous.
“This isn’t right,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear his mind manually. “You can’t hold me here. I’ve got rights, you’ve gotta answer my questions, there’s laws about this kinda thing.” He was rambling and he knew it. “This is a… a…"
“A free country?” she finished for him.
He looked around wildly, eyes blurring slightly with tears.
“Just say it, dear,” she said.
“I’m dead, aren’t I? That’s what this is.”
She clapped her hands and smiled broadly. “Yes!”
He didn’t share her enthusiasm for the revelation.
“Now you’ll begin to feel better. I’m so sorry, but it has to be that way. If you’re told, it takes twice as long to believe it. Longer, sometimes. There, there,” she said as he wiped away tears.
And to his complete surprise, he immediately noticed that she was right. He did feel better. That made everything okay. He had died, and this was next. It didn’t have to make sense, and there was nothing alarming about that. The sudden departure of everything that he had known and understood allowed him to feel paradoxically at ease. The weight lifted from his mind.
He looked back at the woman behind the desk and saw that her name tag clearly said ‘Marcy.’ He’d always liked that name well enough, and the large friendly block letters of the font on the tag were so obvious to read that he was puzzled as to how he hadn’t been able to see it just a few moments ago.
“Well,” he said, drying the hands he’d used to wipe his eyes and feeling much better about things. “What’s next, then?”
Marcy beamed at him. “Excellent. You took that very well. Next is orientation.” She pointed with two fingers at the door that was just a few feet away from her window to his right.
He turned his head and looked at it. He knew that it hadn’t been there only a moment before, and turned back to Marcy in puzzlement.
She shrugged. “You can’t see what you don’t understand.”
“You’re saying that what I see changes based on my understanding?”
“Isn’t that how it’s always been?”
He considered this. “Not usually quite so literally.”
Marcy rose to her feet and left her window, reappearing a few moments later from the inside of the door, pushing it open for him from the inside.
“You’ve always only been able to see what you understood, that isn’t new," Marcy said, "The thing that’s new is that you aren’t sharing your perception with anyone else right now. Think of it like a dream. Your mind creates and perceives simultaneously while you dream. It’s effortless. The body couldn’t interfere because the senses had no place inside the mind. While you’re awake, your subconscious mind has always been limited by what your senses told it was happening.”
He passed by her and through the door, into a hallway, the walls of which were also painted in a color he thought might have been called taupe.
“Now that your body is out of the picture," she continued, "your mind can bypass the senses and perceive what it thinks is happening.”
“My mind?” he asked.
She nodded and led him down the hall. “Very good. No mind without the body, right? Your consciousness. Your spirit, or ka, if you like.”
Daryl, or Benjamin, as he was already beginning to think of himself, shook his head in vague discomfort. “I’ve never been religious.”
Marcy smiled. “Yet, here you are. Religion has really nothing to do with it. You were, and then you were not. Yet you still are. Do you agree?”
Benjamin waggled his shoulders noncommittally. He noticed that the hallway was still carrying on in front of them. It wasn’t elongating, precisely, but they weren’t making it any closer to the door at the far end, either.
Marcy was still setting the same brisk pace, businesslike and pointed. “Your body died. In fact, it was reduced to molecules in an instant. According to your perception, that has happened, and is now in your past. You now know that there is life after death.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps this is just my brain’s way of perceiving my last instant of life, stretching it out for all it’s worth. You said we were in my mind anyway. So what’s the difference?” He felt rather smug at this deft bit of reasoning.
“Yes!” Marcy exclaimed. “That’s precisely it. What’s the difference indeed.” She laughed a musical little laugh and kept right on walking.
Benjamin creased his brow. She seemed to think he had agreed with her, or proved her point somehow. The earlier feeling of confusion recurred. He quickened his pace to keep up with her. He couldn’t understand how they were still not any closer to the far door than when they had started. The hall had looked no longer than twenty feet and they’d been walking along for a couple of minutes at least. It was like walking the wrong way on a moving sidewalk at the airport.
“So you’re saying that my body is dead but my spirit lives on. To what end? And by the way, how is it that we’re speaking English? If that’s the language of the immortal soul, there are going to be a few billion people with something to say about it.”
Marcy smiled. “Some things take longer to ease back into than others. You can’t have everything dumped on you all at once. It doesn’t work. If you were to remember everything in one moment right after leaving your mortality, it would be…” she trailed off.
“Be what?”
Her hand reached out and rested on the doorknob. It seemed they had arrived. Marcy paused. “Hell,” she said simply, and opened the door.
