drawn. For some reason I had to hold back a sob.
“Josh?” I moaned, unsure of what to do. Unsure of everything.
He opened his eyes then. Dark-colored eyes—too dark a color to identify at night. He looked at me and held my gaze in the moment before the paramedics moved him out of my sight, possibly forever.
“Joshua,” he croaked, his voice rough from the river water. “Call me Joshua.”
Then the gurney was shoved into the ambulance, the doors slammed shut, and he was gone.
I stood there on the riverbank, motionless. Some of the onlookers remained after the departure of the ambulance, milling around to discuss what I could only assume was the near tragedy. I barely noticed when the last member of the crowd left and the last set of headlights disappeared into the darkness of the night. I wasn’t really paying enough attention to hear or see anything going on around me.
What I saw instead were his eyes, looking right into mine. What I heard was his voice … talking to me? Yes, I’m sure he’d been talking to me. No one had asked him to identify himself as they loaded him into the ambulance. He’d had no reason to give his name to anyone but me. Most of the crowd seemed to know him. Maybe they’d known him all his life. Maybe they’d sensed, as I had, how important he was.
Of course I knew his importance now. I knew it deep in my suddenly very awake core. I knew nothing about him—not his age, his last name, the way his voice would sound if it spoke my name. But I knew things had changed for me. They had changed forever.
Chapter
THREE
Two days passed.
Their passage, although probably not remarkable to the living, was extraordinary to me. I’d never really had a reason to count the passing days. The sun’s rising and setting had no effect on me except to obscure my vision at night. I didn’t need sleep, and my lack of company in daylight didn’t change at sunset. When the nightmares had begun—wrenching me from wakefulness into unconscious terror and then unfamiliar daylight—I’d lost the will to mark time altogether.
Until now.
Now I couldn’t stop counting each lonely moment as it passed.
On the first night, while I watched the ambulance drive away, I’d thought fleetingly of following it on foot. But I’d ultimately rejected the idea. Even though I could travel instantly through space and time in my nightmares, I hadn’t discovered a way to do so while awake. I still moved at a normal human pace, and I could probably walk for years before I found the hospital where the ambulance had taken the boy.
It hadn’t occurred to me until after the last car had left the riverbank that I could’ve snuck into an empty backseat, maybe gone with the driver to the hospital … and then what? The idea of stowing away with a living stranger on the slim possibility that I would end up at a hospital, wandering lost through its corridors in search of another stranger—well, I felt silly and irrational just imagining it.
Of course, milling around the scene of my death didn’t seem very rational, either.
From the bank of the river, I’d watched as police barricaded the gap in the bridge above me. I’d looked on as a wrecking crew, completely oblivious to their audience of one, towed the boy’s sodden car from the water. While these activities took place, I hardly questioned my desire to stay here—really, who wouldn’t be interested in such things?
But after the activity had ended, each subsequent moment I’d spent at this site made me feel more and more foolish.
For a while I’d tried to justify my need to linger. I told myself that I just needed some time to reorganize my thoughts before I began wandering aimlessly again.
Deep down, however, I knew the truth. I knew the real reason I didn’t leave this river.
I didn’t want to wander aimlessly anymore. I wanted to wander with a very specific aim. I wanted to wander to someone.
Someone who had nearly died (or actually died; I couldn’t be sure) in this river. Someone who, in doing so, had changed me irrevocably.
There were signs, other than my unwillingness to leave, that a change had taken place. First, there were what I came to think of as “flashes.” I would be walking through the woods beside the river, or along the bank, and a flash would happen. An image—bright and colorful, and full of smell and taste—would flash across my mind and then disappear as fast as it had arrived.
Like my nightmares, the flashes occurred unexpectedly. But instead of terror and pain, the flashes brought something infinitely more appealing: what I could only assume were memories of my life before death.
Nothing significant had appeared yet: a black ribbon fluttering in the wind; the sound of a tire squealing on pavement; the earthy smell of a spring storm. No people, no names, no fleshed-out scenes to give me some clue as to who I was or why I’d died. Nor did I really experience the tastes and smells. The things that occurred in the flashes were more like ghosts of those sensations. But they were enough.
However little I saw, I became more and more certain that these images were mine. My memories from life, breaking free of the fog that death had wrapped around my mind.
And it was because of him. Because of his eyes on mine. Because of his hand upon my cheek, placed there as naturally and easily as it would have been had we been made of the same stuff. Skin, blood, bone. Breathing, seeing, touching.
The mere memory of his skin on mine made me tingle. But not some fleeting, imaginary tingle—this was a sensation. An actual, physical sensation. And the next, most miraculous, change in my new existence.
The first time I’d felt something had occurred on the night of the accident. While I stood on the riverbank watching the lights of the ambulance fade, I’d become aware of an odd, pins-and-needles sensation in the soles of my feet. I stared down at them, confused and afraid. Suddenly, I could feel the mud between my toes and the tickling of the dry grass upon my bare feet. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the sensation had ended.
The event had stunned me, to say the least. For so long I’d been desperate for a waking, physical sensation. I’d wanted to feel something, anything. Yet I could place my hand on an object, press myself against it, and it would never matter. I felt nothing. Nothing but a dull pressure that prevented me from going further.
My afterlife had proved all the supernatural stereotypes wrong. I couldn’t walk through walls or float amorphously from room to room. The living people who came close to me didn’t walk through my body but instead seemed to move unthinkingly around me, as though I were just an obstacle in their path.
The only thing I could feel, could affect, was myself. I could touch my hair, my dress, my own skin. After a while this exception provided me no comfort. Actually, it became more of a big, hideous joke: I was trapped in a prison of one. It was as if I existed in my own little dimension, unseen and unheard by others but maddeningly aware of my surroundings.
I have no words
