“Who are you?” he whispered.
“I just told you,” I said, slightly annoyed. “I’m the guy who got pushed off that bridge; you examined me at the scene, and yesterday you practically puréed me on your table!”
“But you’re dead; you can’t speak to me,” he objected.
All right, the man is a scientist, but still, for an academic I thought he was acting pretty stupid.
“Haven’t you ever heard any of those near-death stories? You know, the soul leaves the body, hangs out for a while, and then at some point makes its way through the tunnel.”
“Yes,” he breathed.
“But there isn’t any tunnel here; I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”
He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either, and so we each dwelled on our thoughts, with his forming a bewildered mess.
Suddenly the chaos of neurons within his brain reorganized itself, and a thought formulated itself clearly and distinctly out of the soup of letters: “You said you were pushed?”
“Duh,” I said. “What, do you think I’d go and take a nosedive off a temporary bridge J4K?”
I couldn’t literally see the question marks popping out of his gray matter, but the scientist was obviously unfamiliar with the truncated communication style of today’s youth.
“You were severely inebriated,” he objected, cautiously.
“Well, yeah…” I conceded. “I’d had a few…”
“Your blood alcohol level was three point seven,” Martin countered; he likes to be precise, but I think I mentioned that already.
“Three point seven! Right on!” I was extremely impressed with myself. This pleasure did not persist, however, since my inebriated condition was apparently being used against me here. My murderer was going to get away with it because the official opinion was that my self-induced state of intoxication was the cause of my tumble from the bridge. That’s just not what happened! And even worse, my buddies were going to think I was so wasted I died from my own stupidity. What kind of an obituary is that? “He was wasted and fell off a bridge!” So at that point, my vanity took over: the afterlife has to include a little bit of vindication, too.
“I was pushed,” I emphasized, perhaps somewhat more expressively than was absolutely necessary, but in any case Martin rubbed his temples and groaned.
“All right,” he moaned. “Please stop yelling at me that way.”
“Take it easy,” I said, making an effort to sound cool. “So tell me one more time exactly what the epitaph is that the cops are going to be carving onto my tombstone.”
I felt those question marks popping up again like bubbles in the bathtub when you let one, but Martin had already understood more or less what I wanted from him.
“The police investigation didn’t yield any suspicion of exogenous effect, nor did the autopsy. In view of the blood alcohol level, the snow on the stairs, and the poor condition of the railing, the cause of death was determined to be an accident resulting in fatality. However, there will also be an investigation because of the railing.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said clearly and distinctly.
Martin winced.
“You’ve got to tell them that’s not right,” I demanded.
I considered this demand to be logical and quite simple. Pick up the phone, call the cops, let them know, done. But of course with academic types nothing is easy, let alone straightforward.
“On what basis should I make such an assertion?” Martin asked.
The question brought me precipitously close to the limit of my patience. Here he’s got the ultimate witness to a murder, namely, the victim himself, and the doctor is asking on what basis he should disseminate the victim’s knowledge of the details of the crime. Seriously?
“On the basis of my statement,” I said, choosing my wording carefully and judiciously so as not to stoop to obscenities and insults, because I naturally wanted the good man to persist in his good will toward me. The problems you’ve got to put up with as a dead guy!
“That won’t work,” Martin objected. “No one will ever believe me.” And after a short pause: “I don’t believe it myself.”
He rubbed his forehead again and passed his flat hand over his neatly trimmed haircut, a haircut that made him seem like one of those snooty do-gooders hosting some after-school special, and he hastily left the cold room. I let him keep his lead, strolling—if that’s what you might call slowly gliding along without any hustle or bustle—behind him.
At first I kept close to Martin, using any doors that he opened so I could slip through myself, but that was pretty seriously slowing me down. So I started hanging back a bit, testing out my maneuverability. I could get through the narrowest crack in a door without any problem, and I could even whoosh through a keyhole. I brushed up along the ceiling, right over the floor, and even behind cabinets, and I determined that the only interesting vantage point is from above. You don’t see much from behind a cabinet.
I grew braver and left the basement. In the stairwell I floated up one story step by step, but then I created my own sort of elevator by no longer zigzagging up the stairs but just shooting up vertically straight to the top through the center of the stairwell. When that got too boring, I entered the top floor and looked around there. That level—like the rest of the building, but at that point I of course didn’t know this—was also full of offices and laboratories. Men and women, many of them in their let’s-play-doctor coats, were sitting at lab tables and writing desks, standing in break rooms or crouched in front of whatever random equipment there was. They were acting like normal people—talking, making phone calls, drinking coffee and tea out of these unspeakably huge mugs the size of swine troughs with random witty quotes, horoscopes, or pictures of their babies on them. In other words, typical German office culture that, should a UFO occupation force land here one day, will prompt them to completely annihilate the human race. And we won’t be able to blame those ooze-ridden creatures from outer space one bit!
Most of these folks, apart from their stupid mugs and lab coats, looked like totally normal people. So it wouldn’t necessarily have occurred to anyone that all of them were spending their days slicing open bodies to remove their hearts, livers, kidneys, and other accessories and have a look-see at what the deceased had most recently eaten and when they had last screwed and whether there might somewhere be some kind of clue that Grandma didn’t kick it from advanced age but rather had met her demise at the hands of a son, son-in-law, grandson, or the director of nursing services who was hoping to come into a fat inheritance soon. Now that’s fucked up.
So far I had been crawling through the narrowest of crevices, but now I was ready to find out for sure: I assumed position in front of a wall separating two offices, concentrated, and—flashed through. Just like that. I didn’t even feel like I had to rearrange my hair. Of course, I didn’t have hair anymore, but you understand what I’m trying to say, right? I took the same way back through, and the only thing that was unpleasant about it was the visual perception. In other words: “What do you see?” And that’s exactly the problem: “Nada.” To be precise, I can’t see what’s behind a wall that I want to go through. So, it’s like taking a running start, barrelling full steam ahead, and then you’re already there. Where you may not even have wanted to go! It just felt somehow safer floating carefully through a door. It wasn’t as abrupt.
I didn’t feel like messing around by myself anymore, so I went in search of Martin, who I found in the break room. His cup was filled with weak tea, the little paper tag from the teabag hanging over the rim, mercifully concealing some motto by a Zen master printed on the cup’s side.