Erica Orloff - Freudian Slip

He turned to look at her. “I am very sorry. You tell me where to take you.”

She gave him her address and leaned back, shutting her eyes. A tiny sob escaped. Maybe she wanted conversation. Something to drown out that image seared on her brain.

“Why were you still here?” she asked. “I thought I was going to have stand out there and try to find a cab, and there you were.”

“Something very, very strange. I had to listen.” He pointed at the radio.

“To the sex-crazed DJ?”

“Yes, yes. He was shot.”

Kate opened her eyes wide. “Shot?”

“Yes. He is a crazy man, my new friend Kate, but someone else was even crazier. Someone tried to kill him.”

“That’s New York.”

“No, that too, is America,” he said sadly.

As he pulled onto York, Kate watched the bobblehead. The Buddha seemed less merry now, like he was mocking her.

With each nod of his head, the Buddha told her, “You should have known. You should have known. You should have known.”

JULIAN SHAW EXPECTED a long tunnel. Then a white light. Or at least his dearly departed Grandma Hannah.

Instead, he got Gus.

“Listen, old boy, try not to panic” was Gus’s advice, delivered in a clipped British accent.

“I’m too confused to panic,” said Julian, but then he spied his body in the hospital bed, and panic struck him like the shock of a defibrillator.

“Remember not to panic,” Gus urged, but it was far too late for that. Julian let out a Friday the 13th shriek, and frankly, Julian didn’t even care that his scream sounded like a girl’s—like the time he dropped a toad down his cousin Tori’s shirt the year she got a training bra.

“What the hell is going on?” Julian looked down at his body, which had a frightening assortment of tubes protruding from just about every orifice. Bags of dark blood and assorted other fluids hung from IV poles surrounding his bed like silent sentinels. Machines whooshed and whirred and beeped. Their eerie sounds echoed in the otherwise sterile quiet of the room, as if the body were just another machine being driven by devices and not life itself. A nurse appeared to be taking his vital signs, which, if her frown were any indication, didn’t seem to be too vital.

Julian approached her and asked, “What’s wrong with me?” but she looked through him as she walked away, pushed through the door, and back to the nurse’s station on the other side of the glass.

“Hey!” Julian shouted. He followed her, but she never acknowledged him, and when he touched her arm, she didn’t react at all. He turned to another nurse, and then a doctor, waving his arms wildly, “Hey! Someone tell me what’s going on!”

But they all continued working, talking with each other, looking at computer screens, ignoring him.

Because Gus had spoken to him, seemed to see him, Julian now faced the short, thin old man in the blue pinstripe suit, with the elegant little silver mustache and one of those old-fashioned monocles perched on one eye. “What’s going on? Do you know?”

“You don’t remember anything, young man?” Gus asked, clasping his hands together expectantly.

“No. I mean…how did I get to be here, and my body there? Am I…you know…dead?” He said dead in a whisper, because he really didn’t want to know the answer.

“No. Not dead. In a coma.”

“A coma?” Julian again looked at his body—long black hair, thick and curly. High cheekbones. Tattoo of an angel on one forearm, another of a hypodermic needle near his elbow, with the words Rock Or Die on the biceps above it. Yep. It was him. He was a good-looking SOB, he thought, even though his face was nearly as pale as the bedsheet.

“Yes, my dear chap. Seems you are in a coma or I wouldn’t be here.” Gus smoothed his burgundy tie, fussed with his diamond tie-tack, and then clasped his hands behind his back, rocking slightly on the heels of his highly polished black shoes.

“Where is here? And, for that matter, who the hell are you?”

“Well, no need for hostility, young man. We’re Neither Here Nor There. And I’m Gus, your Guide.”

“Come again?”

“Neither Here Nor There. As in, neither in Heaven nor in Hell. We’re in between. Or, rather, you are. And I’m to show you the ropes, so to speak.”

“Why aren’t I over there? With my body?”

“Good question, which begs a thorough explanation. As thorough as I can give you when we have a rather pressing agenda. How familiar are you with quantum physics?”

“You’ve gotta be friggin’ kiddin’ me, little man. Not at all. I’m a DJ, the shock jock at WNRQ, not a…physicist. Jesus, I must be dreaming. I gave up heroin a long time ago, but is this a flashback or something?”

“No. I am not a figment of your imagination. Trust me, you are not that creative. All right.” He sighed. “As best as I can explain it, the universe is always moving. Even a table, a chair, a rock, they have moving parts, tiny atoms and particles and, if the string theorists are to be believed—and they’re right, you know—there are parts even smaller than that, like tiny strings in a realm we can’t even begin to understand, it’s so microscopic. Mind-boggling, actually. And the universe—from the cosmos to tiny particles—is in a state of constant motion, ever expanding and accelerating, with the idea that one day, it may actually collapse back into itself, though I am not entirely privy to all the secrets the universe has up its sleeve.” He chuckled slightly.

“Speak English, pal.”

“I’m trying, young man. Again, I can’t be positive of what the future holds for the universe. However, I do know that the universe is not, ever, at any time, in a state of inertia. In terms of astrophysics, cosmic inflation describes the exponential expansion driven by a negative-pressure vacuum energy density.”

“Look, buddy…can we get past all this science stuff, which I can promise you I am not ever going to understand, and get to the part about how it is my body is lying there with tubes up my friggin’ nose?”

“Getting to that. You see the way God made the universe, She created Heaven and Hell, and then the place in between.”

“She?”

“Of course. You mean to tell me you never noticed how women are the nurturers, the creators?”

“Well, maybe but…you know, the whole Bible and…”

“Written, I’m afraid, with a bias. By men. The original Old Boy Network.”

“So you’re saying a chick made the universe. Including Neither Here Nor There.”

“I know. It’s an unwieldy name. I wish She had thought of something…I don’t know, catchier. But nonetheless, just because you happen to be in a coma, you do not, my new friend, have a free pass as far as the universe is concerned. You must be doing something. Consequently, you are Neither Here Nor There, and you have work to do while you are in the in-between realm. We have an agenda, which, I might add, we must get to. Soon.”

“And you?”

“Me? I’m a Guide.”

“Got any identification?”

“Afraid not. I would have presumed the very fact that your body is there and we’re here would be identification enough. It usually is.”

“What’s with the British accent?”

“I was British on earth, and apparently it’s quite difficult to lose the accent, even after centuries in the Afterlife. I’ve retained a love of stout, too. And scones.”

“Afterlife. I thought you said we weren’t dead. Afterlife sounds suspiciously like ‘after you’ve bought the farm.’”

“We aren’t dead. I am dead. Was dead, actually. Now I’m a Guide. Well, technically, I am still dead, but my spirit…Well, I suppose it’s all about whether you view the glass as half-full or half-empty. You, on the other hand, are not dead. You are…well, in this rather in-between state.”