Neil Burton wished he could sit down for just a few minutes. It wouldn’t even need to be a comfortable chair. He’d be happy to be able to plop down on an old crate. He had tried many times in the last ten years to take a seat but his phantasmal body would simply pass through the chair and he would find himself awkwardly floating six-inches off the ground. His body would end up intertwined with whatever seat he had selected: an embarrassing fusion of the chair and body. Not that there was any reason to be embarrassed; no one could see him.
Had he known how things were going to turn out, he would have made some very different decisions on that fateful day in 2009. First, he would not have gone to work at the produce processing plant. He, definitely, would not have attempted to eat a sandwich while using a forklift to rearrange thousand-pound crates of vegetables. The angel who had greeted him after the accident had told him that his death could not be avoided. It had been his time and there was no way for him to cheat his fate. Even if that was true, and he was guaranteed to end up being laid to rest in peas, he still would have made one very different choice. He remembered the day of his demise as if it was yesterday.
“You have two options,” the angel had said to him. At least, Neil told himself the being that had appeared to him was an angel. The middle-aged woman looked more like a librarian than a member of the heavenly hosts. She wore a floral print dress and flat Patton leather shoes. Her permed, slightly gray hair sat tall on her head much like Neil’s mother’s hair in old photos from the sixties. If it were not for the faint golden glow that encompassed her, Neil would have thought she was just a passerby who had stopped to gawk at his fatal accident.
“You can spend an undisclosed amount of time in Purgatory, waiting to receive your heavenly reward,” she continued. “Or, you can choose to remain on Earth as a spirit and try to earn admittance to heaven by saving a living person’s soul.”
Neil wanted to scream. He wanted to climb back into his body and dig himself out of the avalanche of snow peas. However, a calmness enveloped him. He found that he was much more accepting of his fate than he should have been. Who would have guessed that death felt like being slightly buzzed on pot? He did note that he did not have a craving for Cheetos. In fact, he wasn’t hungry at all.
“How long would I have to be in Purgatory?” he asked.
“What part of ‘undisclosed’ don’t you understand?” was her tart reply. “It all depends on how good of a life you lived. Some people move on quickly; others wait for centuries.”
“If I stay here as a ghost, all I have to do is save someone else’s life?” Neil wanted to make an informed decision. He knew that he had not been a terrible person during his time, but he was far from being a saint.
“Not their lives,” corrected the old woman, “their souls. You must help them to avoid the path of evil. You need to make them a better person.”
Neil pictures himself as a ghostly apparition scaring some teenager straight. “That doesn’t sound too difficult. I chose the second option.” Why not be proactive?
The angel took a small notebook and pen out of her oversized handbag. She flipped through a few pages and eventually made a small checkmark before returning the tablet to her purse. “Ok, it is official. Good luck.”
Neil had hundreds of questions about his new state of being. Before he could even begin to ask any of them, the woman disappeared.
His perception of his surroundings changed when the angel left. Everything was darker, hazy. What had been a beautiful sun-filled day was now shrouded in murky gloom. He could still see the world around him but it was difficult; like trying to watch television through colored glass.
He watched as two paramedics lifted his lifeless body onto a gurney and rolled it toward the waiting ambulance. Neil tried to grab one of them so he could ask them to call his mother, but his hand passed through the man’s shoulder.
“Wait, I need to tell you something,” he shouted. The two emergency workers did not hear. They continued on their way. When the paramedics spoke to each other Neil could not hear them. The challenges of communicating across the veil worked both ways. This was going to make his quest nearly impossible. What had he gotten himself into?
Neil watches the ambulance leave. There were no sirens or flashing lights. This was not an emergency. There was nothing anyone could do to save him. He looked at the site of his death. A group of men had begun to clean the area. They scooped up the tons of fallen pea pods and loaded them into crates.
“Who says vegetables are good for you?” though Neil.
Ten years later, Neil regretted his decision every painful day. He constantly begged and prayed to the heavens that this assignment could be over. How was he supposed to save someone’s soul when he could not speak to or be seen by anyone? He remembered the movies and televisions shows in which a spirit could communicate or move objects or make pottery by using emotion and intense concentration. He had tried thousands of times and failed miserably. Maybe there was no truth to the fiction he had watched. Perhaps he was just too weak to perform those actions. Instead, he spent his days and nights drifting around the city looking for someone to help and some way to do so.
Today, he was in the park. He floated next to the swing set. Sometimes he would pretend that the feet of some child pumping the swing would hit him and double over in faux pain. He didn’t know why he bothered, no one would ever see him. Maybe it made him feel alive for just a second. He had just finished a particularly outrageous pratfall when he heard the sound of laughter.
“That was pretty funny,” said a voice from near the merry-go-round. Neil looked to see an elderly gentleman floating toward him. The gentleman was dressed in a red golf shirt and khaki pants that were pulled up a little too high on his waist.
“You can see me?” Neil immediately realized how stupid his question was. “Are you a ghost too?”
“Not really,” was the man’s reply. “I’m on a one-day pass from Purgatory. I came to check out on my grandson. My name’s Bill, Bill Holman.” He moved closer to Neil and offered his hand.
The two men attempted to exchange a handshake but only managed to watch their hands pass through each other in a strange and silent version of a high-five.
“Oops, forgot that we can’t have physical contact here.” laughed Bill.
“You mean you can touch things in Purgatory?”
“Sure, it’s pretty much like being alive, only there isn’t much to do.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. I would have chosen that over this.” Neil paused as the kid on the swing set jumped off and flew through his upper torso. “What’s it like there?”
“Pretty boring, usually. We play board games. I play a lot of Monopoly with Albert Einstein and Marx.”
“Carl Marx plays Monopoly?”
Bill shook his head. “No, Groucho.” The older man held his hand up next to his mouth as if he was holding a cigar. “Buy Mediterranean Avenue and win a duck.”
“So, you’re telling me that if I had picked Purgatory, I would be spending my time playing games with famous people?”
“Part of the time,” answered Bill. “We also have Netflix. I’m almost through season five of Lost. I can’t wait to see how it ends.”
“It’s not fair,” whined Neil. “They could have told me that. I would have picked Purgatory over being a ghost.”
It was Bill’s turn to be confused. “But don’t you simply need to save one soul and you get to go to heaven? That shouldn’t be that hard.”
“It’s impossible,” scoffed Neil. “I can’t talk to anyone. I don’t know which people need saving. I can’t do anything.”
“Really? When I visit, I can hear everyone. That’s how I found out my grandson is in trouble. I was kind of hoping I could find someone to help him.”
“What do you mean?”
Bill pointed to a teenage boy who was hanging around the edge of the skateboard park. “You see that boy over there. That’s Little Bill. He’s at a tough time in his life. He is very close to deciding to make some bad decisions. There are a couple of teens who hang around the skate park trying to get kids to do drugs or help them with small robberies. Billy can’t keep coming here. He is going to get roped in by those guys.”
“Believe me, I would love to help. It would be good for me and your grandson. I just don’t know what I can do.”
Bill, a disappointed look on his ghostly face, shrugged. “I suppose I could look for another spirit to help. There must be some ghost around that can do something. I only have a few more hours on my visiting pass. I can’t get another one for six months.”
“I wish I could help. I’ll go try, but I don’t know what I can do. In ten years, I have only been able to touch something physically twice. Once I nudged a woman but who didn’t even realize it. Another time I was able to make the flame on a cigarette lighter flicker. I was trying to blow it out and keep some young girl from starting smoking, but I didn’t come close to putting out the flame.”
“I’m going to go look for some else to help. I bet there are a lot of ghosts around the art museum. I would think a lot of people died of boredom in there.” Bill smiled at his own joke and began to drift in the direction of the museum.
Neil cursed his horrible luck. After ten years of abject failure after failure, he had been presented with a chance to end his ghostly imprisonment. He knew who to help and what had to be done. He just did not know how to do it. In his anger, he kicked at a soda. His foot went through the aluminum container and Neil fell backward in an excellent imitation of Charlie Brown. Instead of falling to the ground as he yelled, “Aaugh”, he slowly floated downward until he lay horizontal a half-foot above the grass.
“I hate being a ghost,” he yelled to everyone though he was heard by no one.
“I might as well try to help Little Bill,” though Neil after he floated back to verticality. He moved toward the skatepark trying to think of some way to prevent the teenager from being pulled into a life a crime. If he could communicate with the boy, he could tell him that his grandfather was watching him and wanted him to follow the straight and narrow. He could try, but he had never been able to say a single word to anyone let alone relay an intricate message.
“Please, I beg, let me be able to help this time,” Neil prayed.
He reached the skate area just as Little Bill was about to drop into the half-pipe. Once the boy started skating it was going to be impossible to get his attention. Neil came up from behind and tried to tap the teenager’s shoulder. Per usual, his finger was not stopped by the boy’s body and was unnoticed.
The boy yelled something to his friends and began to push his skateboard forward.
Neil instinctively reached to grab him. Without thinking, he tried to grasp the young man and prevent him from launching. As expected, he was unable to grab hold of the boy. However, for a brief instant Neil’s hand did not pass through the shoulder. Neil’s hand pulled the boy, ever so slightly, before moving through. It was a minuscule amount of contact. Little Bill probably didn’t even notice, but it was enough to have an effect on the boy’s balance.
The skateboarder dropped into the u-shaped apparatus. His board shot out from under him and he fell backward, landing in an awkward position. The boy appeared to scream in pain and then in horror when he saw the unnatural position of his broken right arm. Other skaters rushed to his aid. Two of them took out their cell phones. One called for help; the other grinned as he took a picture of the mangled arm.
Neil looked at the sight before him. He had not meant to hurt the boy. He had messed up, again. He was about to move away and go find some dark corner to pout in when he noticed the gloom and fog that had surrounded him for over a decade dissipate. For the first time in years, bright sunshine illuminated his world. Confused, he turned to find the same older woman who he had met on the day of his passing.
“Congratulations,” she announced.
Neil’s confusion couldn’t prevent a huge smile from appearing on his face. “You mean I saved that boy’s soul?”
The angel shrugged. “Sort of. His broken arm will keep him from skating for six months. He won’t be hanging around with the bad influences for that time. So, I’m calling it close enough. To be frank, I’m kind of sick of hearing you whine and complain every day.”
“I don’t care why you are doing it. I’m just ecstatic that you are letting me go to heaven.”
“Well, actually, you don’t get to go to heaven. I really shouldn’t be counting what you did as saving a soul, but I can use it to get you into Purgatory if you wish.”
“Oh, I wish,” shouted Neil. “I would love to be able to go to Purgatory.”
“Good,” answered the angel. “There is one important requirement, however. You cannot tell anyone there about the last season of Lost. They need to discover that for themselves. After all, it’s not heaven. They have to suffer a little bit.”
—
James Rumpel is a retired high school math teacher who has greatly enjoyed using his newfound additional free time to rekindle his love for science fiction and the written word.
Love this, James!! Nice balance between inevitable and surprise. Good depiction of “God works in mysterious ways.”