He feels so, so real, and I’m terrified.
And, before my knees can buckle beneath me, I run like I’ve never run before.
Chapter 9
Damon
I dread going home to the flat. For the last three days, the dead boy has been returning to me when I’m alone. This morning as I was making breakfast, there he suddenly was, motionless and glaring at me with the familiar hollow, empty gaze. I bolted out of the flat door, still in my pyjama bottoms, down the staircase and into the lobby, trying to catch my breath.
When I eventually crept back into the flat, I had it to myself again. I left for work moments later without showering, my toast untouched.
So now I’m delaying returning home even though my shift finished two hours ago. Instead, I sit with a handful of co-workers I don’t really know in the staff canteen. It doesn’t matter that we are all at different tables scattered about this characterless room. As long as I am with other people.
What the hell is happening to me? What is it I’m actually seeing? Have I brought this boy back with me from the other side like some fucking hitchhiker from hell? Is he a ghost or am I hallucinating? I’m not spiritual and I don’t believe in the supernatural, so that leaves a hallucination as the most probable explanation. I am seeinghim because I’m going nuts. I ask my phone’s AI to look up the words ‘brain injury’ and ‘hallucinations’ and learn the two often go hand in hand. When the brain is damaged, it can misfire, creating distorted perceptions. So that’s what the boy is. A perception, not a physical manifestation.
Okay, so now I know what I’m dealing with.
However, the relief I thought this explanation might bring doesn’t arrive. Because it doesn’t explain how I can stop myself from imagining him. It’s only been a little over three weeks since I died, so perhaps I must give myself time to heal. Or maybe I need to find out if he once was real, and, if so, why my brain has brought him back to my conscious mind.
I begin googling other people’s accounts of what it’s like to watch your life flash before you as you die. Searching for people like me.
‘It was like reviewing your whole life in one short film,’ reads a Reddit post. ‘But with no end goal. None of it was judgemental, only a factual representation of my life.’
‘For me it was like watching the longest-ever movie condensed into a few seconds but knowing every bit of it was true,’ a woman on a YouTube video recounts. ‘Each single memory stored in my brain – many of which I hadn’t thought about in years – was included ... passing me by at the speed of light.’
My experience was similar, but with one key difference: I haven’t returned alone. And no matter how hard I search, I’ve yet to find anyone else reporting a stowaway.
Then I go off on a tangent to try to understand how our brains behave when we’re dying. A medical study of one patient’s last moments claims doctors measuring his brainwaves noted a high and low frequency fifteen seconds before his heart stopped beating. Such frequencies are patterns associated with meditating, dreaming, concentrating and memory retrieval. So something pretty complexwas happening inside that patient’s brain they couldn’t explain. Was it his life flashing before his eyes, preparing him for death? They couldn’t prove it wasn’t.
The author of another research paper describes her theories as to what a dying person experiences: ‘It’s as if they know death is coming and the last thing they can do is to get their house in order. They want to review all they’ve done in their lifetime, all their actions, reactions, behaviours and thoughts. These life reviews allow them to find the meaning to their existence and know they served a purpose.’
This all makes absolute sense to me. Because I think that’s what my brain was doing. But it still doesn’t explain the appearance of the boy.
I need to think about something else, so I busy myself by updating my LinkedIn profile and trying to make some connections with recruitment agents. I don’t know what there is beyond the supermarket that might be suitable for me, but I have to start somewhere.
Eventually, when I can no longer put off the inevitable, I make my way back to the car, drive home and pause on the landing outside my flat, bracing myself for what, or who, I might find inside.
I unlock the door, quietly turn the handle –and see nothing. The television is still switched on, talking heads chattering, in the corner of the room. The morning’s hastily abandoned coffee and toast are where I left them on the kitchen worktop. I flinch at a sudden noise behind me, until I realise it’s only the couple in the apartment opposite, arguing again.Home sweet home.I keep the front door slightly ajar so I can hear their raised voices on one side of me and the television’s mindless chirping on the other, hoping the unholy combination might prevent the dead boy from returning. Even if only for one night.
Chapter 10
Damon
‘Everything alright?’ asks Adrienne from the seat next to me.
‘Sure, why?’
‘You look a little out of it.’
‘That’s my default setting,’ I try to joke. ‘Perpetually bewildered.’
‘That’s handy, because that’s precisely the quality we are looking for in the father of our baby.’ Melissa smiles. ‘A perpetually bewildered man.’
‘Is there any other type?’ Adrienne asks.
I pretend to be amused, but I’m not feeling it. Or much of anything else, beyond preoccupied. Powerfully preoccupied. But I’m trying hard to disguise it. Be the person I was before I drowned. I repeat those words to myself.Before I drowned.It almost sounds as normal to me now as sayingbefore I turned on the TVorbefore I ate lunch.
The walls of the waiting room in the fertility clinic are decorated with posters of couples and single people smiling and cradling babies or holding their toddlers’ hands. I’m seeing nothingmirroring our situation: me, my ex-wife and her girlfriend, who I’m trying to get pregnant. We are a reality show waiting to happen.
