1
It is a funny thing, desire.
I remember being a little girl, down on Earth, and being absolutely swamped with jealousy over Bekah Pryor’s hair, a popular girl from my reading class. Long and black and glossy and bouncy, it swished to-and-fro everywhere she went, and I remember looking at my mousy blonde mop and wishing I could become anyone but me. But it is not until we get up here that we realize most of what we wanted down there on Earth was stupid. Good hair, more attention, a shiny new beach cruiser – these are all meaningless here. Even the desires that were specific to me: a working stomach, a face that wasn’t scarred, a boyfriend to call my own – all those things seem so silly now, drops in the bucket. Because what I want is below, and the objects of my desires are all breathing. And this is more powerful than anything I could have experienced as a human, stronger than the sea, braver than bravado: I am jealous of humanity. I am twenty-four forever, wishing to grow old beside my family and Cooper. And I never will.
Even funnier is irony. Oh, I was faithless as a human. I will admit that. I was so torn down, so dejected, so intent on denying the forever of life, since my world had shown me nothing but difficulty. But now I look back and wonder what I was thinking. It is so ironic that that ignorant girl would get forever handed to her on a platter, and then be forced to live in it for another forever. Of course I’d had my ideas about heaven, if it existed at all. But what I discovered was so much better, and so much worse. Just keep listening. All will be revealed in time. Well, most. Not all. But I will try.
Up here where we know better, we sometimes call humans the Unliving, as a sort of inside joke. Their hearts may be beating within the cages of their ribs, sure, and they may be capable of producing occasional bursts of beauty and generosity and love, but they are still so lost, stumbling down in the darkness of the Earth. It is not until they cross over that they are able to shed their fear and insecurities and their self-doubt and all the other burdens that keep them from fully realizing the potential of their souls and truly crossing into the light, to the other side, the free side, the side where we know the truth. If only they knew all of this before it was too late. I would like to change that, though. If only I could figure out how.
In my second life, I live in one sectioned-off apartment in a big house across the street from the sea. Until our souls are conditioned and educated enough to not be scared or confused, we are given surroundings we understand. I can go anywhere as a soul, soaring through the cosmos whenever I please, so at first I wondered why souls stayed in one place. But then I realized: why do humans stay in their homes? Why do dogs stay in their humans’ homes? We find a nest and we stay there. And I am comfortable here. So I stay.
As a girl I envied this grand old house, wondered what possibly went on behind the big square windows with the maroon swag curtains. Now I live here, except it is not exactly the same house, and not exactly in the same place. You know how when you dream, your surroundings look sort of as they do in real life, but not really? You’d be in your local mall, except it really wasn’t your mall at all, but some warped, dreamy version of it? That is my version of Jacksonville Beach, my former town. And it is not always beautiful: just like a soul, this place has moods, and sometimes the fiercest gales in the universe can descend – usually when a young person has died on Earth, or when injustice has been doled out somewhere. It is all connected in ways humans will never begin to comprehend. My town is also subject to the whims of the other souls inhabiting this place. One morning a towering set of snowcapped mountains will stand just beyond the buildings at the invisible edge of town; the next, a giant purple moon will hover silently over the ocean. We decorate just like anyone else. I suppose these are the doings of my roommates, who enjoy seeing pieces of the places they came from on Earth, or just like to play around with their new abilities. My home does not look the same to them, either, but we are all just passing through, and the version they live in is of no importance to me. Heaven is a place where nothing ever really happens, and I am focused on what is below. But why? If I can’t just pop back into my body and be alive again, why am I being kept here?
Why, exactly, are we here? And why not just move on to whatever lies beyond?
In the beginning I asked this of women and girls, boys and men. No one seemed to want to tell me. They looked at me strangely and then vanished to wherever they wanted to be. They disapproved of my curiosity, my confusion. They simply didn’t understand my fascination with saving the Unliving. Even the dead children look down on me, regard me strangely. When you find out the truth, the thing you learn here, you stop wondering and accept reality. But I wondered. Something was wrong with me, they said. I supposed I carried over too many of my human traits, and as a human I was extremely stubborn and headstrong. So I could not abandon my questions. There was a point to my life: to find love by the sea. I knew that much. But what was the point of my second life? There had to be a point to all this, this life after life, besides just becoming the beauty humanity ran from, or else I would’ve moved straight through to the Beyond. Right?
To get answers about this strange second life, I started watching the other ones here. My neighbors are…interesting. Most of the souls here are young – it is rare to see someone in the grey area who reached more than, say, fifty-five Earth years, since anyone older than that lived full enough lives and tied up enough loose ends to move on after death and Ascend from this place and get where they needed to go, for better and for worse. So the people here all have fascinating death stories, as they did not die of old age. There are the usual things – cancer and suicide, etcetera – but you can find anything and everything. There actually is one old man in my building, though. Every morning Mr. Knellings walks down the steps and stares at the street from the front porch, muttering to himself. “Get out of the way, darling,” he will say, over and over again. Linda, a woman who was murdered when her convenience store got robbed, told me that Mr. Knellings’ daughter is going to get hit by a UPS truck in a few years, and he is trying to warn her. He loves her so much that he has become fixated on saving her. Like I said, sometimes we maintain certain qualities when we cross over, and apparently he was very senile when he passed. But no one has the heart to tell him it is worthless, and not just because we are dead and have no hearts. We cannot meddle with death when it really wants to descend on someone. Nobody can. It has been written in the stars. That much I know already.
Still, I am fascinated by the fall, by the thing that made these souls rise to this place. The girl in the apartment next to me drowned in a monsoon in eastern India. She is friendly but quiet, and we exchange only a few polite words every day before she hurries away and locks herself in her room. She was swept away in the floods of the hurricane with her little sister and initially survived by clutching a palm tree, but the waters rose too quickly, and the palm started drooping under their combined weight. In the end she gave up her spot, nudged her sister further up the tree to save her, and died an hour before a Red Cross boat arrived. She still banishes every rain cloud that presents itself over the ocean in front of our house. That is why I do not try to talk to her: I know where her eyes are. They are eternally on that palm tree, staring up at her sister, just like my heart is locked within that summer with Cooper. And it always will be. Just because we aren’t supposed to regret doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to remember. And sometimes the remembering is the only thing that keeps me anything close to sane.
Sheila, the woman who lives in the unit behind Mr. Knellings, died while minding her own business, shopping for handles for her new cupboards in Northern England one cloudy Thursday in November of 1996. She’d caught her husband sleeping with her own half-sister, and the new kitchen was his make-up gift. Cute little yellow cabinets, a new oven, the whole works. The police passed her as she stood on the sidewalk, chasing a suspected killer who had fled the scene of a routine traffic stop, and when she thought the commotion had passed she stepped into the road. A lingering police car rounded a corner and hit her so hard, they had to peel pieces of her off of the metal wreckage of the cruiser. The killer escaped and is now living in the mountains of Scotland as a recluse. Sheila says she can’t decide who she would kill first if she had the choice: the killer, or her no-good husband. Once I suggested letting go of her anger. She called me childish, said there was obviously a reason I had stayed behind, too, or I wouldn’t be here, and disappeared into the sunrise.
Just as everyone has a story on Earth, everyone has one after Earth, too. Some people died quietly and peacefully. Some died in the throes of pain and anguish and misery. But everyone has only one thing in common: they know they wasted their lives, and if given another shot, every one of them would jump at the chance to live life and actually live it this time.
And I know you don’t believe me. It is natural for humans to ignore what presents itself all around them. Have you never felt a prickly feeling in a cemetery, a strange coolness on your skin on the birthday of a dead loved one? Humans brush off the supernatural as cheesy or corny, but there is no such concept as the “supernatural,” anyway: there are simply the things humanity understands, and the things they do not yet understand. And I couldn’t resist showing myself to Cooper a few times, too, just to give him something to remember me by. And not just on the beach that day, either – there were many more times I slipped and showed my former human form. I lurked in the clouds over Autumn’s wedding, I stood in the corner during countless quiet dinners between Cooper and Colleen, watching and wishing I could be there in my flesh. And I apologize for that petty instance when I revealed myself during his first post-Me hookup, therefore ruining his chances. I may be dead, but I am still Summer Johnson.
By the way: I know I owe you another apology. Sorry for breaking in. I know you thought you were only reading Cooper’s story, but I couldn’t resist. I’m dead, I am beyond. Of course I can break in. I am not constricted by what constricts you. And by the way, you don’t even know what a story is yet. Cooper’s story is my story, and my story is Cooper’s story, just as anyone who loved someone and lost them is forever entwined with them. We are eternally linked with the ones we love in ways our Earthly brains can never even begin to comprehend.
And there is no such thing as “breaking in,” either, by the way. There is simply nothing to break. Humans are a massively confused and misguided kind, God love them, and they therefore seek order and meaning and organization in nearly everything – but there is none of that here. Walls are not real, there is only the world and everything in it. Humans are the only animals who think of such things. They may have transportive souls, but they are still animals – if you don’t believe me, touch your chest right now and feel the ball of muscle beating within it, keeping alive your flesh. And they have ruined their own world by separating themselves from each other. Think of it this way: what other animal puts up literal barriers between one another? When is the last time a squirrel built a wall between its friend as they sat on a branch eating acorns together, putting stone to mud to exclude itself from a fellow creature? Humans invented walls. They created barriers. They are their own worst enemies in that regard. (And, sigh, I miss squirrels so much. I never noticed things like this while on Earth, but to have a docile mammal crawl the branches of the oak tree fanning out above you while you sit under its generous shade is a small bit of overlooked and bizarre magic that a soul like me would die all over again to sink back down to Earth and experience.) So forget about what you think you know about Cooper’s story, because I am his story. I can also sense what you’re wondering about me and who I used to be, and fine, I’ll get to death. You are human – you cannot escape your curiosity. So let’s just get it out of the way, shall we?
I had health problems all my life, and when I was twenty-four, my doctors decided on a do-or-die surgery in an attempt to fix me. And I died. It was like nothing you have experienced before, and with good reason. There is a reason most people do not come back from death: it reveals all, and one cannot come back from that. That would be beside the point. There simply are no words, but I will try.
I knew there was a chance I would not wake up from my surgery. That’s why I tried so hard to find someone to love, to leave my mark. I put myself out there, broke out of myself, met Cooper, and tricked him into falling for a girl whose days were numbered. But foolishly, I hoped for a good outcome for once. So I was smiling as the nurses put me to sleep. And that’s when things got weird.
I didn’t have a “dream” during the operation, per se. I do remember drifting down, like I was sinking into a deep well, and then I remember the walls closing in, the light above me being squeezed into a pinpoint and finally disappearing. But within only a few hours, it opened again. And immediately I knew something was wrong. I remember sensing that this was too early, that not enough time could have passed for my surgery to have been successfully carried out. Where had all the time gone? I was not gently waking up into a recovery room full of smiling family members: I was being jerked awake in the operating room. I was strangely aware of all the people around me, the franticness in the air, and I felt a gaping hole somewhere in my body where my organs should have been. For some bizarre reason I wondered where my cat was, and whether she had been fed that day. Then my soul started to bleed out of my body on the operating table, and all at once I knew what was coming. My body was failing me. I wasn’t waking up: I was dying.
My death was neither here nor there, neither this nor that. My doctor came into work that morning distracted by personal issues – I could see it all in the rearview after I died – and he was not prepared when his fingers first touched the scalpel. When it became clear that something had gone wrong, nurses and aides begged him to stabilize me and transfer me to a larger hospital that could save me, and he met these insistencies with a shrug. He didn’t want another canceled surgery on his record, so he went back into my body and halfheartedly tried to complete the procedure, figuring that if I died, he’d have enough influence at the hospital to clear his trail and keep his record clean. What was another dead girl, another name in the obituary section? So he plowed through. He was so right, and so, so wrong. My family trusted him, and he killed their only daughter. But more on that later. His fate is already hanging in the stars.
As the nurses and doctors milled about, I left myself for a moment. In a sense it was like being trapped in twilight sleep between yourself and the world, escaping your own body, watching from above for the first time ever. Humans think death is the end, but in reality it feels more like a victory of sorts, a sweet release from something you didn’t know you were trapped in, a transition into something unknown but still somehow greater than anything you’ve ever fathomed before. The sum of death’s parts were bigger than life itself had been. Life on Earth is all about overcoming battles. What battle could be bigger than death?
If only I knew.
As I said, I was not yet fully “dead” when I officially started leaving my body. I remember blackness, and then a rip lifting me out of that oblivion, a tear, a blur. And then another. Soon, every thirty seconds or so, I was jumping out of myself, my soul jumping a border like a war refugee. One of the things humans do not understand is that death is not a cut-and-dry process. It is not, poof, you are alive, and then poof, you are dead. Have you ever blown out a candle and then touched the wick, only for it to still singe your fingertips? Something as magical and magnificent as a human is not so easily snuffed out. My brain was still active, and could still sense my family in the next room, feel their love being spilled onto me in the form of their worry. I was not angry, I was just sad beyond any meaning of the word “sad” I had ever known. It was a sorrow that smothered me, a sadness you could slice through with a sword. The things that stuck out at me as I watched my family agonize over me, the things that screamed at me with an intensity I had never experienced, never even dreamed was possible, were the things I did not do – the words I never said, the love I never gave, the hugs I walked away from. Suddenly they were all jumping out at me, all at once.
Oh my god, I thought as a flipbook of my failures played in front of my eyes. I am dead. This is really happening – has already happened. I will never get a redo. My story has been written.
And when I finally gave up, when I accepted that I was gone and that crying about it wasn’t going to help, is when the Transmutation happened. And that is when I realized that really, my story had only just begun.
Everything up to that point had, quite simply, been my prologue.