“So I tried to haunt you, so I could feel a little better, and let you know about hell. I don’t know how to explain it. How I knew how to do it. But I knew how to do it. I was sure that I knew. How to haunt you. I was sure. And this is what I did: I thought of you, really pictured you, really clearly. I pictured you looking out your bedroom window, smoking a cigarette. I could see it crystal clear. The way your shoulders were hanging, how you were holding your Quill, the frost on the glass at the bottom of the window in this kind of mountain shape or like a cresting wave, even the smell of the fabric of the curtain, the way the smoke was curling on the way to the ceiling, the sound of your breathing—everything there, I could see it, hear it, smell it, you know? And I guess the idea was that all I had to do was wait for you to stand at the same spot at your bedroom window as I was picturing, in the same position that I was picturing, your cigarette burned down to the same point I was picturing, and so on—everything just had to match up—and then, once you did that, once you and the smoke and the frost and the smell all lined up exactly with what I was picturing, I’d be able to haunt you. And I waited and I focused, and I waited and I focused and focused and focused, I waited for you to line up with the picture, so I could haunt you, and, pretty soon, I stopped being scared. I mean, the picture was so vivid, it calmed me down. And it was a nice picture. My son, thinking, enjoying a smoke. I liked the picture, and it was like I was really almost living in it—that’s how vivid. Hell wasn’t so bad, I thought. My mind was clear, I had all this focus. I could do this for a long time, I thought, before it got old. It might never get old. I could live in this picture, exploring the details, waiting to haunt you.
“But almost just as soon as I started thinking that, Billy, everything started going to shit again. Because to haunt you, I realized, you had to line up just right with the picture, and the more of the picture that I paid attention to, the more things there were that had to line up. I don’t know how I figured this out, but I did. It was true. I knew it was true. So like if you lined up perfectly with every last thing I was picturing except for one—just a button undone, a hair out of place—there would be no haunting. I wouldn’t be able to do it. And already, you know, I’d noticed the shapes of the ice on the window, like I said, and the way the smoke moved—these things already, I saw how they might have ruined my chances. So there I am, trying, on the one hand, to not be so alone and miserable in hell, and the only thing that’s making me less alone and less miserable in hell is how vivid this picture of you at the window is—never in my life could I picture something so vivid for so long a time, you know? this is the one and only benefit of being dead in hell; being able to dive into this picture—but then, on the other hand, the more I look at this nice, vivid picture, the more things I notice, and the more things I notice, the more things have to line up just right if I want to haunt you, so I’m killing my chances of ever getting to haunt you, and that’s what I’m really after to begin with. That’s what’s making the vivid picture so important—it’s what’s making me want to picture it so bad to begin with; it’s why the picture’s vivid, understand? Because if I get it right, if you get it right, if you line up with the picture, I can haunt you, and so I’m good at picturing it. I have to be. But, same time…How do I explain this?
“It becomes like the whole ‘Don’t think about an elephant’ thing, except there’s stakes, really high stakes; it’s the difference between being able to haunt you, and never being able to contact you again. And I’m fucking up is the thing. I’m losing. I keep noticing details. Even now, you gave me a pen, I could draw how the ice on the window looked. Every peak and valley. I could draw the folds in the curtain, the way the light hit the surface of this glass of water that was getting dusty on your night table, next to this book of matches that’s only got two matches left, and one of them is bent, and the other one’s half-bald, probably wouldn’t light. And so on.
“So that’s how I spent the end of my time in what I thought was hell. Trying not to think about an elephant. Trying to look at the parts of this picture of you that I’d already probably seen too much of, and without noticing any of the details I hadn’t seen yet that I wanted to see because I knew they’d be vivid, which would make me feel better if seeing them didn’t make it even harder to haunt you.
“And then I opened my eyes, and I wasn’t in hell. Obviously, right? I wasn’t in hell and I’d never been dead. I was here, in the hospital. They said I’d passed out at the plant, right there on the floor. And I guess what happened was the plant’s doc came rushing down with his kit, and he gave me some smelling salts, and I woke up screaming in pain, they tell me, and the doc stuck me with some morphine, which I’m allergic to morphine, and I fell into, I guess, a ‘mild coma,’ which, to me, sounds something like ‘temporary damnation.’ I think that they specified mild coma to get me to think twice about causing major legal trouble.
“Not important at this juncture in the story yet.
“As I was saying, I tried to haunt you, woke up in the hospital, and it turns out I didn’t have a heart attack at all. I got what they call sudden-onset impeller’s twist. Fucked discs in my back throwing the bitch switch. It’s usually a repetitive-motion thing, impeller’s twist—I never heard of this sudden-onset kind—and I always stayed in shape to keep myself from getting it, but…Anyway, I’m done. End of career. No more impelling.”
“And you’re smiling because…” I said. “Because you…found God?”
“Found God? I was in a fucking coma, Billy. I was having an allergic reaction to morphine. I’m smiling because I’m not dead, I didn’t have a heart attack, I did some superhuman shit that saved a friend from dying, another friend from losing his foot, the doc says the surgery I’m getting in the morning’ll relieve my pain at least ninety percent and he hopes for a hundred, and I’ll have a normal life as long as I don’t impel anymore, which why the fuck would I ever impel again, anyway? Because I did, in fact, write down on my health sheet that I’m allergic to opiates, and my whole crew saw Chuckie malfunction epically, which means even if I wasn’t insured out the ass with workman’s comp and disability, I, Clyde Franklin Magnet, father of you, age sixty, would be retiring nearly five years earlier than planned on the fatassed settlement money the plant’s gonna offer me as soon as I come out of surgery alive tomorrow, and then, when I do reach sixty-five, I will still collect my old-school, well-deserved, fatassed pension for the rest of my life. And you’re not smiling about that because—why? Your inheritance—you’re gonna have one, now. More than just a little house in Wheelatine, Billy. Smile.”
“I’m smiling,” I said.
“Not even kinda. Show me the choppers.”
“I’m smiling inside,” I said.
“Everything’s gonna be fine, now,” he said.