“I said the exact same thing!” I exclaimed.
Connor looked at me with eyebrows raised, but said nothing. He turned and walked on.
The back part of the office was hidden from the front by a ceiling-length dark red curtain that ran from wall to wall. It deadened the sounds of the hectic world of the filers and cube dwellers for the rest of us working behind it. Connor pulled it aside and the three of us passed through the narrow gap into the back office. The atmosphere was more casual back here, but still too waiting-room for my tastes. We headed toward a quiet corner, where several leather couches were surrounded by a glass table that was cluttered with file folders and old coffee mugs. We waited for Irene to take a seat before the two of us sat.
The luck of the draw put Irene directly opposite me again. Now that we were a bit more familiar by a whole ten minutes of talking, I was able to look her in the eyes without shying away like a teen at a high school dance. Strangely, the life that emanated from her had woven its own little spell over me. My eyes fell into hers…for how long, I wasn’t sure. Connor cleared his throat loudly, pulling me out of it. Irene was still looking at me, smiling.
I blushed like a fool in reaction, feeling a strange mix of pride and embarrassment at being the focus of her attention. I looked to Connor for guidance, but he merely shrugged in response.Thanks, pal .
“Irene,” Connor said, clearing his throat once again. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which would you prefer to hear first?”
She turned nervously back to me, seeking some kind of guidance, but I remained silent. The debriefing part of dealing with spirits was Connor’s territory and I wasn’t going to overstep my bounds here. In my first four months I had already stepped on enough toes while scrabbling to learn the intricate ropes of paranormal investigation.
“I think I’d like the good news first, please,” Irene said after a brief hesitation. One of her hands moved to cover her mouth as she braced herself. Even the good news might be dreadful.
Connor put on his most chipper voice and said, “The good news that the kid and I have to share with you is this: You havenot been relegated to a flaming, fiery hell, complete with pitchforks, demons…the whole works.”
I was sure he hoped his tone would lighten the situation but the panicked look in Irene’s eyes told me that Connor had failed completely. What remaining color there was in Irene’s face drained away. Her body flickered in and out. “If that’s the good news, I don’t know if I’m prepared to hear the bad.”
Connor scratched his temple, searching for the right words. I couldn’t imagine there would ever be a right choice of words in a case like this.
“Well,” he said, opting for unadorned bluntness this time, “let’s put it this way. You’ve recently become less…earthly.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” she asked.
“Meaning…” Connor said, drawing the word out like a sigh. He was buying time, hoping for inspiration to strike. It didn’t. Connor was off his game around her, for reasons I couldn’t quite figure out just yet. “Meaning…you’re dead. You’re what we call ‘the recently living,’ which is the PC term to use these days according to the Mayor’s Office.”
Irene slumped back against the couch, attempting to take in Connor’s sudden, life-changing (or was it death-changing?) statement about her entire worldly existence. I could only imagine what the poor woman was going through. I knew that I wouldn’t take it well if someone walked up to me and cheerily said, “Hello! Sorry to piss in your cornflakes, but you’re dead. Have a nice afterlife.”
Irene sat statue still for the next five minutes. Only the muffled sounds of the office indicated that the world continued on around us. Finally, she leaned across the cluttered table, and beckoned for us to lean in as well.
“I don’t buy it,” she said.
“Don’t buy it?” Connor scoffed. “You don’thave to buy it, Irene! It’s afact . You ‘buying it’ doesn’t change anything! As a matter of fact, you’ve already ‘bought it,’ if you follow my meaning. Look!”
Connor picked up the folders on the table and, one by one, threw them at her. Well, through her. They vanished into the space her semitransparent body occupied, but I heard them hit the fabric of the couch behind her. Gone was the sensitive Connor who opened doors for the undead—he obviously felt shock tactics were in order to get Irene through her “denial” phase. But it was too much for Irene and her eyes brimmed with tears as she attempted to brush the protruding folders away from her body.
“How is this even possible?” she said as she turned to me.
I looked away, ashamed at Connor’s approach. Maybe I missed the memo declaring Tough Love for all walk-in cases. I brought my eyes back to hers. “I don’t know. But I’m afraid it’s true, Irene. Death comes to all of us.”
“Then why am I here?” she demanded, her voice rising with anger. “Why aren’t I in heaven or hell or whatever there is out there? Why am I sitting in the back of a Village café talking to two strangers about the fact that I’mdead while one of them obnoxiously throws thingsinto me? Shouldn’t that be all she wrote, gentlemen? I mean, I’ve reached the proverbial end of the line, haven’t I?What am I still doing here? ”
“I wish there was an easy explanation I could give you,” Connor said, the frustration melting from his face. “There’s…just…a lot we don’t know yet.”
“Why don’t you tell me what youdo know?” she asked with open bitterness.
Connor was trying to keep his own hostility from kicking back in and I hoped he remembered just how traumatic these events were for Irene. But there was still sarcasm in his voice when he spoke. “Well, Ican say for certain that you are definitely deceased.”
“Connor,” I pleaded, hoping to soften him. “Come on.”
Why was he being like this? Too many years on the job? Maybe as with all service-oriented jobs, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that we dealt with other humans, touching their lives. Day in and day out, it took an extreme amount of effort to remember how to treat people.
“I apologize,” Connor said, backing down, “but like I said, you’re definitely passed on. I’m not sure how you died, but the kid and I can look into that. Don’t worry if you can’t remember anything right now. It’ll probably come back to you. As far as why you’re still here, well…usually when a spirit lingers, there’s something binding them to the material plane. Unfinished business of some sort. Nothing mundane, mind you. Nothing like ‘I forgot to turn the stove off.’ More of a vengeance thingie…or perhaps you have an important message to pass on to a loved one. It must be something that your soul found very disquieting when it was forced from your body so unexpectedly.”
“Do youhave any loved ones?” I had to ask, even if it sounded like I was suddenly playingThe Dating Game . But Irene was too caught up in what Connor was saying.
“And if I figure out why I’m here, then what?” she asked as she flickered in and out with increasing nervousness. One moment she was there, the next she looked like she was being energized by the transporter beam onStar Trek . “Where do I go from here?”
“That’s where it gets a bit sticky,” Connor said. “We’re not quite sure. Clearly the soul is meant to go somewhere, but we earthbound aren’t privy to that. We get stuck with the burden of determining just how these supernatural occurrences happen in the first place and what sort of impact it has on the living. Obviously there’s no known way to explore what lies on the other side without, you know, dying. It could be the soul gets recycled, reincarnated, and you’ll find yourself as a furry lemming headed off the cliffs of Dover in the next life. Conversely, youmay go to a heaven of some sort, but whose version of heaven? Is there a pantheon or are we talking monotheistic? In the end, though, there’s no simple way to give you a solid answer.”
“Can’t you research it?” she asked. “Or do something? This is my life here!”
I shook my head.
“There’s way too much paperwork to even set that in motion,” I said. “Our secretly sanctioned agency wouldn’t even know what forms to fill out to investigate what happens in the afterlife. We’re not budgeted for it, either.”
Irene had gone from angered to shocked. “So you’re telling me there’s too much bureaucracy, red tape, and too little funding to give me a definitive answer on my fate?”
“In a sense,” Connor said. “That’s merely the very tip of an enormous investigative iceberg, Irene. Let me see if I can explain this a bit further, because at this point, you really don’t have a lot of avenues. You’re dealing with an autonomous agency that deals in the paranormal, but we’re still under all the constraints of an office. Half our investigative results contradict what they’re finding in at least two of the other divisions! On any given case, we’ve got monotheistic proof, polytheistic proof, and no proof whatsoever—all at the same time! It’s mind-boggling, even to me. I can’t even address some of the seemingly simple questions.”
“Such as?” Irene asked.
“Well,” Connor said as he pointed to Irene, “here’s a good one. I can’t tell you why your hand can pass through most solid objects, yet somehow you’re material enough to sit on that sofa without falling through it.”
Irene looked nervously at the sofa below her. “What exactlyis your function here, Mr. Christos?”
Connor smiled. “I see dead people…for a living.”
“Meaning what?” Irene asked with persistence.
“Look around the room, Irene,” Connor said. “Most of the people in this room are trained specialists in some bizarre field or another. Most of them can’t even see you sitting here with us. Not everyone does what I do. Not everyone can see what I see. Hell, the kid didn’t even notice you were dead until I pointed it out to him.”
“Well, I noticed you,” I added. “But I didn’t notice that you were…recently deceased…”
Connor continued, “People like you, Irene, are one of my purposes for being here. I need to figure out why you’re still with us.”
“Maybe we all become like this?” she offered. “Maybe this is as good as it gets. What if all we have to look forward to is hanging around after death, being ignored by the living and occasionally spotted by some crackpot on the street!”
“Well, then, you’re in luck,” I said cheerfully, “because we’re just those types of crackpots!”
Connor ignored us, shook his head again, and continued.
“That’s extremely doubtful,” he said. “And I’ll tell you why. Manhattan is a city of over eight million residents, not to mention tourists and commuters. The amount of death that occurs daily in an energy center like this is astounding, but the documented occurrences of souls walking around are negligible in comparison. If what you’re proposing were the case—if all spirits hung around after dying—I wouldn’t be able to go two feet in any direction without tripping over someone’s soul. It’s just not the case.”
There was a moment’s silence as Irene thought it over. I watched her, looking for signs of comprehension, but only noticed the cute crinkle of her nose. She looked to Connor and quietly asked, “Why doyou think I’m here?”
“Honestly, I haven’t a clue, Irene. But I need you to think. Think hard. Are there any words, any thoughts that spring randomly to mind? Anything at all? I want to see if you’re capable of free-associating any information that might be useful to us. Names…faces…an address, perhaps?”
Her brow furrowed with the effort of recollection, her nose scrunching up again.
After several moments of trying, she said, “Nothing.”
“Damn,” Connor said.
“Well, now what?” I asked.
“Wait a minute!” Irene said with a sudden burst of excitement. “That word.Now .”
“I think we’d need something a lot more specific there, Irene,” he said.
“Quiet,” she said, waving him away. “It triggered something, I’m not sure what. I have an image of that word floating in my head. I’ve seen it somewhere recently. I think it was on one of the movie posters out in the café.”
I leaned across the table wanting to reach out to her, but refraining. God only knows what part of her I’d accidentally put my hand through this time.
“Can you tell us which one?” I asked.
Her hands shook excitedly as she tried to recall. “It’s that one with Martin Sheen. Where he goes up a river…? And there’s this tribe of men dedicated to Marlon Brando!”
“Apocalypse Now!” I shouted, bouncing on my seat as if I had just won a prize on a game show.
Irene nodded. “Yes! That’s it. That’s the image I have in my head. That’s really not very helpful, is it?” Her face sank. “God, I feel so useless.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’ll come to you. Give it time. Right, Connor?”
When Connor didn’t respond, I turned to look at him. His eyes had narrowed considerably.
“What is it, boss?”
“I know that front room like the back of my hand,” he said. “Thereis no movie poster forApocalypse Now .”
That put things in a different light. I rose from my chair. I didn’t want to leave Irene alone, but things were getting frighteningly interesting.