John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

I realized then that, remorse or otherwise, these nine months at Mr. Challait’s had left me at that moment very calm. Erin of course was laughing, her face full of buttery wrinkles, and I understood also by now that whatever we’d learned in this job wasn’t going to be of much practical use in the next. But I sat feeling calm nonetheless. Calm like when my mother and father used to dance in the kitchen, humming uncertain tunes of their own, calm as, for example, the resume on the table between my wife and myself. In fact, reaching across it to touch Erin, I was overcome by calmness, except my heart, which was down there somewhere going insane.

We live on dead worlds. I can recall my first meeting with Ul ‘Lyu, when I began to realize what that meant. And this was only our first meeting. This was before I came to see the carnival lights inside her, before I started to needle her with my pet rhyme on her name, “you jewel -you, Ul ‘Lyu.” This was before I fell in love. Our very first meeting, and she turned my afterlife into a hell. Ul ‘Lyu asked me, at that time:

“On your world, what’s the principle for recycling souls?”

“A moral principle,” I said. “We operate on a moral principle.”

I’d had to give my answer a long moment’s thought. Here I’d just for the first time laid eyes on this creature, and she was coming after me with the hardest question I could think of. Indeed, the setting for this conversation alone still took some getting used to. Ul ‘Lyu’s eternity had rammed into mine, a terrific collision of afterlife environments. The souls in my world were knocked flat. Now that I have traveled — now that Ul ‘Lyu has compelled me to travel, past farther orbits, past the solar winds — I can picture how it must have looked, that initial accident. Ul ‘Lyu’s world must have smashed into mine like a plaster birdbath dropping from its pillar edgewise onto an old compost heap that had hardened to clay. The lip of her world had sunk a short distance into the tough ooze of mine and there got stuck.

So: one moment I was marking time, living somehow through the excruciating boredom after death, and the next I was flat on my back. Above me the smoky ceiling of my world trembled unnaturally. And then after picking myself up I’d run towards the crash. At the blurred overlap of the two worlds, the astral floor had buckled from the impact, so that finally I had to stop running and pick my way from buckle to buckle, as if hopping stones across a river. There I found her, there at the borderline, floating off the ground. She was an indistinct Other, a kind of jellied ball, floating off the ground. And at first glance, unmistakably, she was female. My heart rose like a flipped coin. Yet no sooner was I standing before her, on one of the higher buckles in the astral floor, than with the very first words out of her mouth this visitor had come after me. This visitor, this intruder, had challenged my entire life and death. My principle, she’d asked? My principle ? I’d had to give my answer some thought.

“A moral principle?” she asked next, that first meeting.

“Yes.” And I frowned. It was time to demonstrate I also could come out swinging, I also could play hard. “You know?” I asked with exaggerated politeness. “You know, right and wrong?”

Ul ‘Lyu’s jelly surface quivered. For a few seconds she withdrew, floating away from me and into her own world. But she had the strength to back up her curiosity.

“A moral principle?” she repeated more firmly, coming again into full view. “Impossible. The complications, ooo. Just imagine…it’s impossible.”

I stiffened up on my astral hillock. Ooo? I wasn’t even entirely sure I’d seen this creature’s face yet. I thought: Okay. She wants to play hard, we’ll play hard.

“What’s your system?” I spread my stance, aggressive but being careful not to slip. “Or I mean, what was your system, when your world was still alive?”

For I knew from the nature of the collision that she lived, unlike myself, on a true dead world. Of course Ul ‘Lyu and I hadn’t done any talking about that difference between us, yet. Our talking came later. But I knew nonetheless, even that first time, that she knew. Ul ‘Lyu knew this difference between us; she knew her disadvantage.

Yet, unbelievably, she ignored my insult. Instead her reaction was something I wouldn’t have imagined in a thousand years alive or dead. Her surface turned to iron in certain places. While floating in mid-air, before my eyes — solid iron! The change startled me so much that I stumbled, falling back off my floor’s wrinkle. I wound up unevenly in and out of a crevice, like a man sitting sideways in a bathtub.

I thought I’d been humiliated. I thought I’d be laughed back into my world forever. But Ul ‘Lyu, oh my Ul ‘Lyu. You never noticed.

“I don’t recall,” she said finally. Her body softened to jelly once more. “I’m not sure we ever knew why we were in heaven or on earth.”

Didn’t recall! She didn’t recall the very reason she’d lived? Then had these been children , on Ul ‘Lyu’s world? Now she hovered over me, even her laws of gravity an enigma. And those moments she’d spent thinking, the iron that had emerged at various places along her pale, gelatinous soul, that had intrigued me. Moreover, especially, there was the way the entire power struggle underlying our conversation had eluded her. That too….

Next, she asked my name. Trouble, I should have told her. Trouble for us both.

The principle, on my world? The system by which we recycle the living spirit? Ul ‘Lyu never grew tired of talking about it, and I never grew less than amazed that she didn’t know her own.

In my universe even some of those “down” there, in the physical world, are aware of the system. I can recall that when I was last a teenager (Ul ‘Lyu couldn’t get enough of these memories) there were some extremely dull books that described where people went when they died. These books proved to be correct. The dead, we dead, come first to a vast reassignment depot, like any immigrant. From there, from here, we are eventually cycled out again, as newborn physical types. Eventually, it happens eventually. All this is as reported in those dreary paperbacks, and one thing more as well. There exists a priority system for the re-entry. This system itself I never fully understood; nor do I now. But the principle behind the system, as I told Ul ‘Lyu, was and is clear. A good individual is rewarded and an evil one punished.

“Yes I see, Baby,” she would say, using the pet name she preferred to my own. “From here, it’s so easy to tell which was good and which was bad. But I wonder—”

And so soon, on one of our first trips together, my remarkable Ul ‘Lyu came to the tricky part of the business.

“But I wonder, Baby. You tell me you were always the same, the same person in every appearance, the same you are now?”

I didn’t answer. Though I understood her argument, I was already more interested simply in hearing her voice, its musical changes. And I loved to feel the electric hum within her. Because in order to speak with her this way, in order to be near her, I had literally to attach myself to Ul ‘Lyu. I had to sink my hands up to the wrist in her creamy essence. Beneath her surface tension I found nothing to hang onto, but if my hands were inserted far enough I would be held by the suction. Then Ul ‘Lyu would fly, over my glum landscape, as I dangled below.

“The same person, Baby? In all the different lives?”

I relented: “Yes, Ul ‘Lyu.”

“Then how could it ever be? Are you bad now? Are you good now? It’s impossible.”