The Traveler

Michael was finding it difficult to talk. It wasn’t just moving his lips and tongue; it was the awkward, laborious effort to conceptualize ideas and come up with words for them. The mind was faster than words. Much faster.

“I-think-that…” He paused for what felt like a long time. “This is not a hallucination.”

“Describe, please.”

“This was always inside me.”

“Describe what you are seeing, Michael.”

“You-are-blind.”

Michael’s annoyance grew stronger, twisting into anger, and he pushed with his forearms to sit up on the table. He felt as if he were cracking his way out of something old and brittle, a capsule of yellowed glass. Then he realized that the upper part of his ghost body was vertical while his flesh body remained behind. Why couldn’t they see this? It was all very clear. But Richardson continued to stare at the body on the table as if it was an equation that would suddenly produce its own answer.

“All vital signs have stopped,” Lau said. “He’s dead or-”

“What are you talking about?” Richardson snapped.

“No. There’s a heartbeat. A single heartbeat. And his lungs are moving. He’s in some kind of dormant state, like someone who’s been buried beneath the snow.” Lau studied the monitor screen. “Slow. Everything is very slow. But he’s still alive.”

Richardson leaned down so his lips were only a few inches away from Michael’s left ear. “Can you hear me, Michael? Can you…”

And the human voice was so difficult to listen to-so attached to regret and weakness and fear-that Michael ripped the rest of his ghost body from his flesh and floated above them. He felt awkward in this position, like a child learning to swim. Floating up. Floating down. He watched the world, but was detached from its nervous commotion.

Although he couldn’t see anything visible, he felt as if there were a small black opening in the floor of the room, like a drain at the bottom of a swimming pool. It was pulling him downward with a gentle force. No. Stay away. He could resist it and keep back if he wanted to. But what was there? Was this part of becoming a Traveler?

Time passed. It could have been a few seconds or several minutes. As his luminous body drifted lower, the power-the attractive force-gained strength, and he started to get frightened. He had a vision of Gabriel’s face and felt an intense desire to see his brother again. They should face this together. Everything was dangerous when you were alone.

Closer. Very close now. And he gave up struggling and felt his ghost body collapse into a globe, a point, a concentrated essence that was pulled into the dark hole. No lungs. No mouth. No voice. Gone.

* * *

MICHAEL OPENED HIS eyes and found himself floating in the middle of a dark green ocean. Three small suns were above him in a triangular arrangement. They glowed white-hot in a straw-yellow sky.

He tried to stay relaxed and assess the situation. The water was warm and there was a gentle swell. No wind. Pushing his legs beneath the water, he bobbed up and down like a cork and surveyed the world around him. He saw a dark, hazy line that marked a horizon, but no sign of land.

“Hello!” he shouted. And, for a moment, the sound of his voice made him feel powerful and alive. But the word disappeared into the infinite expansion of the sea. “I’m here!” he shouted. “Right here!” But no one answered him.

He remembered the transcripts from the interrogated Travelers that Dr. Richardson had left in his room. There were four barriers that blocked his access to the other realms: water, fire, earth, air. There was no particular order to the barriers, and Travelers encountered them in different ways. You had to find a way out of each barrier, but the Travelers used different words to describe the ordeal. There was always a door. A passageway. One Russian Traveler had called it a slash in a long black curtain.

Everyone agreed that you could escape to another barrier or back to your starting place in the original world. But no one had left an instruction book on how to manage this trick. You find a way, a woman explained. Or it finds you. The various explanations annoyed him. Why couldn’t they just say: walk eight feet, turn right. He wanted a road map, not philosophy.

Michael swore loudly and splashed with his hands, just to hear a sound. Water struck his face and trickled down his cheek to his mouth. He expected a harsh, salty taste, like the ocean, but the water was completely neutral, without taste or smell. Scooping up some of the water in his palm, he examined it closely. Little particles were suspended in the liquid. It could be sand or algae or fairy dust; he had no way of knowing.

Was this just a dream? Could he really drown? Looking up at the sky, he tried to remember news stories of lost fishermen or tourists who had fallen from cruise ships and floated in the ocean until they were rescued. How long had they survived? Three or four hours? A day?