On the Other Side
by Ron Sanders
The whole gang pressed in when Michael started foaming. His eyes rolled back, flickered a bit, and seemed to squeeze into his skull. A great breath filled his lungs.
Sherri and Whiz grabbed the arms, Dale and Cindy the legs.
Michael’s back arched. His hands clenched. A second later, he was thrashing wildly. A long shudder worked up from his toes, tightened his sphincter, snapped back his head. He lay absolutely still.
No one said a word; all eyes were on that wracked face. Slowly, a bloody bubble formed over the boy’s mouth. A red ooze broke from one nostril and began to roll down his cheek, catching the amber haze of street lamps.
The gang looked up simultaneously. Their eyes all flashed, and their common sentiment was spontaneous: “Cool!”
“So tell me what it was like,” Sherri probed. “I mean, what it was really like.”
Michael hemmed evasively. But he’d always been shy; a distant boy with a sweet interior. Sherri liked him that way. The other girls went for the jocks and the jerkoffs, but Sherri found it more fun cracking the shell than buffing the surface.
“It was like they say,” Michael mumbled. “’You’ve never really lived’—”
Sherri completed Morté’s most popular catch phrase: “‘until you’ve seen the other side’. So what was it like? The other side. Were you dead?”
Michael turned. “I couldn’t have been, Sher. Or I wouldn’t be here. Nobody comes back.”
“I know, I know. But what was it like? Did you feel you were dead?” She giggled at her own notion. “Dead people don’t feel.”
“I felt...” In the car’s half-light Michael’s face was not unlike earlier, under the street lamps. “I felt... things I wasn’t supposed to feel. I saw things I wasn’t supposed to see.”
“Like what?”
“Like... things.”
“Okay, Mikey.”
At that most unmanly nickname, the blue hollows of his face turned violet.
“Okay, Michael. I’ll just have to find out for myself.”
“No, Sherri. You can’t do that. You mustn’t!”
She gave him her patented peeved look. “Don’t play control-freak with me, Michael. Everybody’s doing Morté. ‘What’s good for the goose’, right? Why should guys get to have all the fun?”
“It’s not fun! Not fun. Only...”
Sherri turned away. “Christ, Michael, you’re starting to look the way you looked back there, like something out of George Romero. If it’s no fun, the hell with it.”
“Only...”
“Only?”
“Only I’m going back in.”
“Michael.”
He kept his eyes shut. There was no way to close his ears.
“Michael.”
That was what he hated about life. How do you tell an adult, before he gives you all that crap about having so much to live for, that there’s just so much to die for.
* * *
“Michael.”
He opened his eyes.
The stupid shrink was watching him as though he were a fish in a bowl. Stupid pince-nez. Stupid little goatee. Stupid folded hands in a stupid brown suit.
“If these questions are making you uncomfortable, Michael, we can start with something fresh. But you should know your father is paying a boatload of money for this session, and will only be that much harder to live with if he feels we didn’t make progress.”
“I realize that, sir.”
“Now, Michael... peer pressure can cause a youngster to make decisions that are not in his best interest. This street drug, Morté, with its ability to temporarily mimic the cessation of life, is achieving notorious popularity among the young.” Dr. Vie closed his eyes and drew his sensitive fingers to his lips. He rocked his narrow head and those arched fingers like joined pendula, saying, “Tch, tch, tch.” It was a sissy move. A stupid move.
“Interviewed participants invariably describe an episode of complete darkness, soon followed by a gradual, and most agreeable, return to full consciousness. They claim a profound and powerful sense of resurgence, of being born anew. They claim, too, that this interlude of mock demise is without sensation, and devoid of form. But you, Michael, according to your father, girlfriend, and two paramedics, claim to have experienced a sort of visitation, which you have difficulty depicting verbally.”
Vie’s Mona Lisa smile grew tight. “Now, I have always found arguments for an afterlife, or even an out-of-body experience, intensely provocative. I am sure you have, too; you are an intelligent young man. And, although skepticism is of course indispensable, I am most eager to hear your narrative. I would like it, as they say, from your own lips.”
Vie’s hands locked and unlocked in his lap. He watched this meaningless activity for a moment before looking back up. “You need not feel pressured here; not in this private room, not with me. Understand that my profession’s ethical code ensures complete confidentiality between doctor and patient or, as I like to portray the relationship, between mentor and friend. So please feel free to be just as forthcoming with me as with your young comrades. Our conversation, I assure you, will not leave this room.” He leaned forward, causing Michael to just as levelly lean back. “So what did you experience, son? What did you see or feel? In your own words, please, and take your time.”
Michael froze, weighing his options. He could stall, he could lie, he could tell someone what he’d been through. Someone who might not laugh. He licked his lips and leaned forward.
“First I got real sick,” he whispered. “Then I felt cold and numb; I couldn’t move, sir, not at all.”
Vie nodded. “The drug’s effects impersonate rigor mortis, but with a semiconscious twist.”
Michael relaxed his shoulders. His voice approached normal volume, and Dr. Vie leaned back. “Everything stopped. I was dead, sir, not ‘like’ dead’ It was over. I stopped being alive.”
“Yet you perceived this. You were ‘aware’ of being dead. Do you not see the contradiction?”
“Of course. But I still died. I mean, the conscious thing you’re talking about was the old me. I left that. Honestly, sir, I couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t see anything, couldn’t smell or taste anything. What happened was different. But it was still happening.”
Vie removed his pince-nez and fastidiously polished the lenses with a silk-embroidered kerchief while staring at his knees and nodding sympathetically.
Worse than sissified, Michael thought. He was a nancy. A damned fruit was trying to get inside his head. It was obscene; more obscene than the stickiest locker room banter. Good old life, right back in the saddle. It became important to keep talking before that horrible anal cartoon resumed control of the conversation.
“There was someone else in there... over there. Wherever. Someone who was talking to me, but he wasn’t speaking. It was scary, but it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t there. I mean it wasn’t there. Am I making any sense?”
Vie’s nod was encouraging.
Michael’s speech was quickly approaching a monotonic narrative, clearly suggestive of catharsis. At this point it’s important an analyst become as motionless as possible, prod only in the affirmative and fade to black. Teenagers like Michael — withdrawn, sensitive — are excellent subjects when afforded retreat.
“I knew he — or it — was speaking to me, because he called me by name even though I didn’t actually hear him. He didn’t want me to come in. He said... he said when the body dies, the consciousness goes on, but it’s not like what everybody says it is.”
Vie was careful. “You were encountering a ‘soul’, then? An angel, perhaps, come to lead you to the afterworld?”
Michael jerked back to the real. “No! What did I just tell you, man? I said he didn’t want me to come in. I said it was different. I’m not talking about some groovy white light at the end of a tunnel.”
Vie sat perfectly still. The room submerged imperceptibly, the air seemed to clot, the tension was gradually replaced by that same low hum of subtly intimate pause.
“Michael, I would like to perform a kind of experiment now. Do not be alarmed. I am going to diminish the amount of visible light in this room. The purpose of this procedure is to reduce distraction, thereby enabling your far closer approximation of that state you so urgently wish to recover.”
The phrase urgently wish was a seed, planted with an almost sultry undertone.
“I’m... I... I don’t want to be in the dark... not with another man.”
“Do not be alarmed,” Vie repeated. “I shall remain seated, and so shall you.” He rose and turned a dimmer behind the bookcase, returned to his chair. “There. The atmosphere is much more conducive to free speaking.” The room was bathed in a sedative haze. Michael could still see, but Vie was more like a ghost than an analyst. Now they were both dead men.
“He said,” Michael went on, in that prior drone, “he told me that being on the other side is an elecatro...eleckamagnets...”
“Electromagnetic?” Vie wondered, one nancy brow arched. “You are a student of physics, then, Michael?”
Michael appeared to wince in the dimness. “No, he said it was that electric magnet jive you just said. A phemonemon, if I got that right, that was the opposite of life-negative activity, he said. I don’t know science junk, sir, I can only tell you what he told me. And that was that when the physical body dies, the electrical stuff that kept it going ends up in another place; a place where regular-life things don’t apply. You have memories, you have feelings, but you don’t have thoughts or goals or anything like that.”
Vie’s voice was soft and even. “This is most understandable, Michael. One would have little use for goals without a corporeal vessel. But you speak of feelings. They were warm? They were peaceful? What did your friend have to say about feelings?”
Michael’s mouth fell open. His face took on a ghastly pall. “Not... my... friend!”
Vie wanted to kick himself. He tried again. “This visitor, the apparition. What were its feelings, its impressions?”
“Worms,” Michael moaned. “Worms and maggots, eating you. Forever. Horror. Screaming all around. But no sound. Worms. Always worms...” The youthful contours passing from his face were just as steadily replaced by planes and crags of an indigo hue. The eyes now goring Vie were arid and fixed. The analyst’s nostrils twitched at a nauseating odor.
Vie tore at his collar.
“Michael!” He was looking at a rigid corpse in a noxious film. Michael’s mouth was twisted and taut, the teeth appearing to rot even as Vie stared. The boy’s eyes grew bulbous in their contracting orbits. “Do not let go, son!” Michael’s hands became clawlike, his limbs crimped. “Describe what you are seeing. Please. Tell me what you feel.” Vie clamped the kerchief over his nose and mouth. “I want to know what you know!”
Michael’s jaw creaked open. “Stay away.” His shoulders began to arch. “Go back!” His carotids stood out like cables. “Stay away!”
The stench was too much for Vie. He coughed, rose, and stepped back.
“Michael.” The boy didn’t respond. “Michael!” Vie opened his office door and leaned out. “Miss Carter. I would like you to dial 911, please.” He looked back into the room. Michael appeared to be surfacing, as if the blast of light was calling him back. “Hold that request, Miss Carter.” Vie reached inside and turned the lights up to full.
A great sigh left the room.
Michael blinked rapidly. A moment later he was looking all around; a nervous teen unhappy with his surroundings.
Vie stood thoughtfully in the doorway, caught between two worlds. “Michael.”
The boy looked up.
“Your session is over, Michael. I told your father you would call him at home when we were done. He is understandably anxious. I would like you to make that call now. Miss Carter, will you please buzz the door so Michael may phone home.” He allowed a lot of elbow room for the boy’s exit. “Do not be worried, son. Your father loves you very much, and agrees it is best you have plenty of space after this session. You are free to walk home rather than be picked up. He only wants to hear your voice, and to know you are feeling better. As do I.”
There was a long, angry buzz. Michael hesitated, took a few steps. The buzz was reprised. Michael stepped into the receptionist’s office. Miss Carter looked through the glass. At a nod from Vie, she walked into an adjoining room and made for a file cabinet. Vie gave Michael a little nancy smile before sliding back into his office.
Michael picked up the receiver, dialed a number, cupped the mouthpiece with his free hand. “It’s Michael. I know you are. But I can’t talk now. Just be at Cindy’s in ten minutes. I’ll be on foot. Yes. Bring me another hit of Morté, man, and I don’t want to get burned. Yes, yes, yes. I’m going back in. Yes.”
Copyright © 2023 by Ron Sanders
