Chapter III ☯ Limbo
Near Falls City, NE, Aug. 6, 1966, 23:12 CST
I’m told it’s very rare, but I’m still awake for the next part.
There’s a truly hideous, indescribable screeching in my ears. It’s a noise I can feel, it vibrates deep inside me. I can feel it ripping me apart, tearing me into tiny pieces. The noise is excruciating. I’m not breathing anymore. Parts of me, big chunks, are ripping away from me, falling away with the plane, like pieces of rock crumbling off a cliff.
A whiteness in my eyes is burning like searing phosphorous in my brain. I’m not moving. I’m just along for the ride. My old self, the pieces of what used to be me, is still falling with the plane. I feel this falling away. I feel the weight of the entire plane pulling my old self away from me, draining me. I feel it dangling from my legs, sloughing my body away. It’s heavy, really heavy. Tons. It falls. My pieces fall. But even through the pain, I suddenly feel that I’m starting to rise.
I can’t understand it, but the falling away and the rising is something I’m feeling at the same time. I feel pain and see nothing but intense light, but I’m rising. The parts of my old body that I still feel somehow are falling, dragged down to earth in what’s left of the first class cabin of Braniff International Airways Flight 250. The pieces of the BAC 1-11 corkscrew slowly into the ground. I’m still rising but falling, rising but falling.
Finally, the plane impacts, dragging the pieces that were me into the ground with it. I feel the earth, hard and unyielding, greet us, the plane and my body which seem to have fused into one. We smack into the soil of southeast Nebraska. There’s a final burst of noise and pain and colored light and then I feel a sudden lightness. I’m free of the plane, free of the old body, free and light and airy, free for whatever happens next.
There is no thinking during all this, no conversation in my head, not after I saw the time, 11:11, and ‘Nebraska?! Aw, crap!’ There’s noise and there’s light and there’s feeling, but there is no thinking after that. There is only the sensation of falling but rising for a time, then finally the separation, then I’m floating down to earth.
‘Aw, hell!’ I suddenly think. Wait, I’m thinking again! That was something. Say that again.
I’m relieved somewhat that conscious thought is still possible after all, that I appear to still be me.
I stay awake as I come to earth. There is simply a sensation of falling, then not falling, but I feel nothing from the impact. No pain, no crushing. I’m not crying, not hurting. I’m alive, but it feels impossible. I’m feeling some things, some sensations, some impossibilities, but not other things. There is lightness and air, but no more pain or noise. After coming down, I lie on the ground for awhile, not thinking again, not really caring where I am.
After a few minutes, my brain starts to function on a higher level again. I start assessing what’s happened to me. And what’s happened is, we’ve crashed. And died. Samantha, the woman, the businessman, the 35 in coach, Capt. Pauly, the other two crew members, everybody. All of us. This is death.
We were sitting there, thinking about business deals and philandering husbands and idiot children and hating the end of vacations and being glad to get out of Kansas City and where’s the damn stewardess with my drink and why do they make them wear those ridiculous get-ups? And then there were some scary bits and now we’re all down there together in some smoking hole underneath a thunderstorm in Nebraska, and we’ve made a pretty damn big mess for somebody to clean up, probably ruined a farmer’s corn crop or something.
And now I’m just lying in the dirt. It’s both real and unreal. I feel disjointed, which I am. Separated from my body. I’m lying a few hundred yards from a smoking crater, the remains of the main part of the plane. I’m confused, dazed, breathless. It’s going to take some time to figure this out.
A few feet to my left, something moves in my peripheral vision. I somehow manage to sit up. Samantha is sitting over there staring at me. She’s sitting more or less facing the flames from the crash, so I can see her clearly. There’s not a mark on her; she’s perfect, not a hair out of place. She is, shall we say in an understatement, surprised.
Lightning is still flashing, rain is falling, hail even. When it finally registers with me that it’s raining is when I notice something really strange; I’m not getting wet. I’m neither cold nor hot. Golfball-size hail is falling but I’m not feeling it hit me. Samantha raises her face to the rain, but her hair is dry, her makeup perfect. That’s when she starts to scream, realization similar to mine breaking over her like a wave on the beach.
I find that I’m able to move. I scramble over to her, start holding her. Her heart is beating wildly, I can feel it, I can feel her pulse pounding through her body in my arms. She keeps screaming. I realize I’m yelling right along with her. We sit on the ground, clutching each other, yelling for awhile. Seems the thing to do.
Someone finally walks up. It’s a woman, in a white and gray dress, wearing leather boots, a leather belt. She smiles at us. She looks about 25 years old or so, but feels much older. She’s calm and stands there looking down at us. We stop yelling and look up at her.
‘Well, that was quite unexpected,’ the woman says.
I find my voice.
‘Tell me about it,’ I say. It’s one of the first indications I have that elements of personality, like your sense of humor, survive your death.
‘You’ve just had quite a trip. Just relax, take a deep breath,’ she says.
I don’t argue with her or even ask questions. It doesn’t occur to me to do so. Samantha has her head buried in my chest, still sobbing. The rain is falling harder, the lightning is worse, the wind howls. But the woman’s dress isn’t wet or blowing in the wind. And we’re not wet either. There’s mud on the ground, but it’s not on us.
The woman walks closer, then sits, Indian-style, in front of us, looking like she’s prepared to wait for awhile; for what, I have no idea.
I tell Samantha it’s going to be alright, even though I don’t know what ‘it’ or ‘alright’ really are. She just goes on sobbing in my chest. I’m wondering why I’m not sobbing with her, but different people react to the process differently.
‘Just take some time. The moment will pass,’ the woman says.
I nod, even though I don’t know what I’m agreeing to.
Minutes go by; how many, I don’t know. I’m suddenly aware that there are people wandering in the field; some of them I recognize from the plane, like the widow, who is just wandering around in circles. Like us, they’re not wet either, and in seemingly perfect shape, except for being really dazed and confused.
The wind gets worse, there’s debris in the air. As the ability to form more and more coherent thought comes back to me, I begin to realize that we must have flown into a tornado.
The woman is watching the scene around her calmly. She still sits in front of us, her hands folded in her lap. The woman and her daughter, who I saw in Kansas City playing with a doll, walk by in a daze, not seeing us, the girl clutching the same doll. They disappear over a hump in the field, into the howling teeth of the storm, and disappear.
I decide it’s time to get some information.
‘Who are you?’ I ask the woman.
‘My name is Sarah. I’m a Guide. I’m here to help you make the transition,’ she replies. It’s a pretty simple, straightforward answer. The journalist in me begins to assert himself, start forming some questions.
Samantha lifts her head from my chest, tears still streaming down her cheeks. She stares at Sarah. It’s time to get some information.
‘What transition?’ It’s the most obvious first question, I suppose.
‘The transition between the two dimensions of life,’ she says. Again, matter-of-fact, to-the-point. Nothing extra.
‘Oh, THAT transition,’ I say. My natural smart-assedness is still intact.
‘Maybe, you could be a little more specific here? We’re a little … surprised at the moment,’ I say. My journalistic self is also still there, like I said.
Sarah smiles.
‘I’m sorry. I usually prefer to take things very slowly in the first few minutes. But I guess this one is really different and needs a different approach. It’s just outside my experience, you understand. You must have had a job where asking questions, getting quick answers is part of the work,’ she says.
She’s pretty prescient.
‘I’m a newspaper reporter. How about you just take it from the beginning? Who exactly are you, why are you here, what happened to us, and what happens next?’ I say.
Sarah laughs.
‘Okay. My name is Sarah James. I’m a Guide, a volunteer who helps people make the transition between life in the first dimension on Earth and life in the second dimension after that Earthly life ends. There are many of us scattered around. We chose to stay here for a time; some of us like helping people, others just don’t want to leave yet,’ she says. ‘I’ve been doing this for right at 78 years. I helped build the town over there and I like hanging around and watching what happens.’
‘Now, as far as I can tell, you were on a plane which just crashed in this big old storm we’ve been watching all evening. You died, and now you’re ready for the transition, or will be shortly. As for what happens, well, you have several options,’ she says.
This is a bit much, after all. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked so many questions so soon. Samantha buries her head again, starts sobbing.
‘See why I prefer to take things slowly?’ Sarah says.
I’m not sure how I feel, but screaming is still an option. I’m just not sure any sound would come out if I opened my mouth right now. My confusion continues. Samantha is practically choking me, hanging on for dear life. I’m hanging on to her right back. Everything is still quite surreal, to say the least.
‘I am sorry. Sometimes it’s too much, too soon, to take in. Especially when death and transition come suddenly, like yours,’ says Sarah.
There’s that word, death, again. It sounds weird because I don’t feel dead. I’m not dead. I think, therefore I am, right?
Samantha raises her head from my chest, says what I’m thinking.
‘But we’re not dead!’
‘I’m sorry, dear, but your old, Earthly body is dead now. The ‘you’ sitting there right now is your real inner self, what you might possibly have conceived of as your soul or spirit,’ Sarah says.
Curiosity mercifully again wins out over panic.
‘If we walked over there,’ I point to the flames flickering through the darkness, ‘would we … see ourselves?’ I ask. Okay, morbid curiosity, but it’s better than panic.
She hesitates a bit.
‘Well, you would see your remains, yes. But I don’t really think, particularly in this situation, that it’s a good idea, dear,’ Sarah replies. ‘It can be quite disturbing.’
I decide to take her word for it. I just nod my head. Samantha returns to crying in my chest. She’s not particularly curious, prefers panic.
The wind is finally getting quieter, the hail has stopped, the rain is settling down to a steady downpour. I don’t know how much time has passed. In the distance, I can hear a siren. We sit, the three of us, facing each other, listening to the crackling of the fire, voices, cries, screams in the darkness, the distant siren. It’s disturbingly peaceful. Samantha’s crying is easing. Sobs still are shaking her body, but she’s beginning to relax, to adapt, the panic is losing its hold on her.
Sarah starts humming some kind of tune I don’t recognize. Then she stands up suddenly, walks a little way into the darkness towards the flames, and starts talking to a man who has appeared. He’s dressed in white and gray like Sarah, only in pants and a shirt. He carries a walking stick. They talk for a few minutes. They’re not arguing or anything; it looks like they’re trying to decide something. They finish talking, and the man disappears. Sarah comes back and sits down in her former position.
‘That was my friend Hal. He’s a guide too. Been around here for quite a while. He had the general store in town while I was alive. We’ve never seen anything quite like this before. We were talking about getting some more help from other Guides,’ Sarah says.
‘You can do that?’ I ask.
‘Oh, sure. There are volunteers all over the place. I’m sure they’ve either heard the crash or been told about it and are coming on over. We usually handle the daily, single stuff. Once in a great while, we’ll have a multi in a car crash or something. But this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened here, I can tell you,’ she says. She seems somewhat excited about it.
‘Are you an angel?’ Samantha finds her voice, asks out of nowhere.
‘No, dear. I’m not. I’m a volunteer. I stay here to help guide people through the transition. I used to be a nurse in the town nearby. I enjoy the work for now. Someday, I’ll make the transition myself,’ Sarah replies.
Samantha nods. Her grip on me relaxes a bit.
‘I know it’s not exactly polite to ask, but … how old are you?’ I ask.
Sarah laughs, throws her head back.
‘I was born in 1897 near Omaha. I was working in the hospital at Falls City in 1947. That’s the town we’re close to right now. I was driving to work one day. It was winter, snowing hard, icy roads. I went off the road into a snow bank. The car stalled and I couldn’t get it started again. I started to walk to town, but got lost in the whiteness of the snow, went in the wrong direction. They found my frozen body three days later,’ she says.
‘A Guide came up to me when I left my body. He was a former patient of mine. He had died of cancer in 1938. I was so happy to see him. He was a great comfort to me. Explained things. Showed me what’s what. I decided I wanted to stay here, not make the transition, be a Guide myself. He helped me become one,’ she continues.
‘Now, I wander around the area, and when anyone nearby needs me, I’m there to help them. Tonight, I was at a farm about a mile away when I heard the crash. There’s a man there who’s had a stroke and may not make it through. But I came over here. The noise was so loud, I knew it had to be something big.’
‘I guess that makes you about, what, 69 years old or so?’ I say.
She laughs again. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s about right.’
‘Why do you look you’re about 25 then?’ I ask. Because she does. Look like she’s 25. She’s not my type or anything, but she is attractive and young. Brown hair, petite nose, full lips, slim, decent rack, from what I can see in the flickering light.
‘Well, the second body, what you might think of as your spirit, reaches full maturity and perfection at 25 and pretty much stays there,’ she says.
Okay, now I’m very uncomfortable. The conversation is once again outstripping my ability to adapt to the change in my situation. A range of emotions is flooding me and all I can do is just sit there and hold on to Samantha and ride it out. There are many questions, but I’m not sure I want to hear the answers, or will believe them when I hear them.
‘Are you beginning to feel better, dear?’ Sarah asks Samantha.
‘I suppose so,’ Samantha sniffs. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’
‘Most people can’t, dear. As I said, it takes time,’ Sarah replies.
‘Um, how long are we going to sit here? Shouldn’t we be doing something?’ I ask.
‘That’s up to you. You have plenty of choices. If you want to sit there for days or weeks, you can. You can wander around. You can lie in the sun when it comes up tomorrow. Or you can go ahead and make the transition, start your new life in the other dimension. Lots of options,’ Sarah says. ‘Lots of options.’ ★
• 2991 Words written by Steve @ 21:55 | 23-Apr-06 in Departure •
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