The thugs who grabbed me off the street in mistake for Larry had driven me out to Jersey, and, ignoring all my protestations,
dragged me across a deserted nighttime building site until I teetered on the edge of what I suspected was a lime pit. My hands
were already tied behind me and I was gagged, so my screams and struggles counted for very little as I was held there, helpless,
waiting in abject terror for the end. I felt the cold circle of the gun barrel at my temple and closed my eyes.
By the way, in case you’ve ever wondered—yes, you hear the bang, sort of; though it’s more a kind of whooshing sound from
where you are, on the receiving end.
But then, quite abruptly, I found myself somewhere outside and apart from the grim little scene, watching it as though it
were a piece of theater. It was, I remember telling myself, a classic out-of-body experience of the kind I had often read
about or heard described. It even struck me at the time as a surprisingly obvious and even banal psychological device to avoid
confronting the full horror of my situation. There I was, facing “the bourn from which no traveler returns,” and the best
response I could whistle up was nothing more than a memory of some popular piece of folklore about what was supposed to happen
to people in situations of this kind. I felt oddly disappointed with myself.
I continued to watch, however, as my body fell, head blown almost off, into the lime pit. The strangest part of it was that
I couldn’t quite make out where I was watching it all from. It seemed as though I were seeing the same thing from several
different angles simultaneously—multiple views of the same incident, like looking at a Cubist painting. But where was the
singular “I” who was doing this multiple observing? That was a question that crossed my mind, but that I had neither time
nor inclination to explore at that moment.
The scene began to fade as I watched. The last thing I saw was my own body sinking gently into the corrosive whiteness that
would soon absorb every last trace of its existence.
Yet what, not only where, was this “I” that watched? Instinctively I looked down to where my body should have been—and found
it there. In one piece. I was myself again. I could see my hands, my feet, and I noticed I was still wearing the clothes I’d
had on just now when I was thrown into the lime pit. All quite impossible, of course, but that’s what I saw.
At the same time I became aware that the scene I’d been watching, the scene of my own death, had started to fade into a kind
of darkness that was closing in around it. Now another area began to lighten somewhat, enough to show me that I was in some
kind of tunnel. I was moving through it, with no effort on my part, toward a light at the far end.
Pretty standard fare, I thought. Tunnels with light at the end were familiar images from all the descriptions of near-death
experiences I’d ever read, though I still had no doubt that what I was going through was a real and not any kind of “near”
experience of death.
Interestingly, that knowledge provoked neither fear nor anxiety in me. It left me feeling as though I’d been given one of
those shots you get before local surgery, when you are perfectly aware that something very peculiar is being done to some
part of your anatomy, but it doesn’t worry you in the slightest. I found myself casting a curious glance over the walls of
the tunnel I was traveling through. At first I had thought they were of stone, but now they seemed to be of a softer, almost
fleshy substance. The notion flashed into my mind that I was traveling through one of my own arteries, though I knew that
the more likely explanation was that I was remembering the trauma of birth. That, so far as I had always understood it, was
where the tunnel motif in death came from, neatly wrapping up our human life span at both ends.
Quite suddenly, but without any jolt or sense of dislocation, and well before I had reached what appeared to be the end of
the tunnel, I found myself out of it and standing in what looked like a vast medieval hall or perhaps anteroom to an even
greater hall. The floor and walls were of stone—real stone this time—and the ceiling was high and vaulted. Tall windows threw
diagonal slabs of light across the scene, illuminating a scattering of different figures, all in period costume, mostly alone,
some conferring. On the far side of the room one of them turned in my direction and made a gracious gesture inviting me to
approach a door beside which he was standing. I started toward him, finding myself walking quite normally. Nobody paid me
the slightest attention despite the oddness of my dress in these surroundings. The man bowed as I approached and held open
the door for me to go through.
I stepped out into what I at first supposed was a garden, but quickly realized was something more. The gentle rolling landscape
was made not of earth and grass but of a soft cloudlike substance. In some strange way it seemed to crystallize here and there
to form the shape of a tree, or some delicately woven gazebolike structure, while in the distance it dissolved into an impressionistic
rainbow-hued landscape of indescribable beauty. Above it all hung a great dome of porcelain-blue sky, patterned here and there
by clouds of pure whiteness.
Scattered throughout the scene were figures walking or conferring in groups of twos or threes, much as they had been in the
room I had just left, except that here they all wore white garments that hung in casually elegant folds. I turned around,
taking it all in, and to my amazement found that the door I had just stepped through was no longer there. Nor was there a
wall or any other sign of the building that might have housed the great room I had just left. It was as if I had materialized
out of nowhere on that spot.
I looked down at my feet, which I now saw were bare, and I was wearing the same kind of white smock or robe that everyone
else had on. But it was not the suddenness of the change nor the unseen sleight of hand by which it was effected that took
my breath away. The thing that did that was the sight of what I was standing on—or, rather, not standing on.
When I looked down, I saw only space beneath my feet. Space that turned a darker shade of blue as it receded, until it formed
a deep and distant cobalt, with a darkness at the center that was more than black: It was the absence of even the possibility
of light.
It was then I realized that, to all intents and purposes, I was in every child’s, and for that matter every cartoonist’s,
notion of Heaven. Which meant I had to be mad. Or hallucinating. Or something. But for the moment all I could do was throw
back my head and roar with laughter.
“It’s all right, don’t be alarmed. We’re talking you down.”
I couldn’t tell where the voice had come from. There was nobody anywhere near me, and yet it seemed so close it could almost
have been in my head. Which is perhaps where it was. Which would make it just another aspect of the whole crazy episode of
madness I was going through.
“George, look up—to your right.”
I did so. That was when hysteria took over. I found myself looking up at a massive figure sitting on a huge throne. If you’ve
ever looked up at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., you’ll know what I’m talking about. Except that, unlike Abe Lincoln,
this figure wore long white robes and had a white beard, and bore an open book on his head, balanced, facedown, as though
he’d just put it there to protect himself from a sudden rain shower. It was this that was the cause of my mirth, because I
remembered, as a small child, how this had been my first conception of God.
So that’s how it was: Your whole life really did flash before you. Though I had to admit it seemed less like a flash than
a leisurely procession in my case. That was my first real taste of the fact that time had lost its meaning.
“Just let yourself fall back on everything you’ve ever been, George. You don’t have to remember all the details, not all at
once. You’ll be able to recall any part of it when you need. Your life hasn’t gone away. It’s just going to be different,
for a while.”
“For a while… ?”
I had spoken the words aloud, and the sound of my own voice made me jump. I looked around for whoever it was I had been speaking
to. It wasn’t “God,” because He had vanished.
Which should probably be pronounced
vanished,
I thought, and giggled—once again aloud.
“It’s okay, George, everything’s fine. Why don’t you just come over here?”
Turning in the direction that “over here” for some reason suggested to me, though I could not think why, I saw a small rectangle
of silvery light in the midst of a vast gray blue nothingness. Once again all concrete reality had faded, and I was in some
womblike space created from a kind of wispily intangible ectoplasm. When I walked toward the bidden rectangle of light, I
experienced the physical sensation of crossing a floor, feeling a hard surface beneath my feet, though in relation to my surroundings
I had no sense of movement at all. Yet I saw, after only a few steps, that the rectangle had grown larger and therefore by
implication closer. Suddenly, though again without any sense of shock or loss of equilibrium, my surroundings underwent another
instantaneous transformation.
I found myself this time in a bare, functional office. It had one window over which a blind was pulled, a door, and no furniture
other than a chair and a table on which sat a computer. The computer screen, I now realized, was the silvery rectangle I had
been moving toward. On it I now saw the image of someone—a man—looking out at me.
“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Dave. We need to talk.”
I
don’t know how long I sat in front of that screen. As I had already observed, time seemed to have lost its sense of urgency.
Dave explained the situation with admirable clarity. I was not dead. I was caught up in what he called “a loop.” He told me
about the quantum computer that had generated my world, and how it worked on the principle of the “many worlds” theory, with
reality splitting off into endless variations of itself at every quantum branch—parallel universes, as they were generally
called. Coincidences were the points at which these different universes touched. They were usually unimportant, though sometimes
dramatic for the people involved. But if you began to pay unusually close attention to them, thereby introducing your own
consciousness into these quantum events, as I had done, then strange things tended to happen.
“You can wind up unpicking the fabric of your own reality,” he said, giving me the line that I later embellished and used
on Larry.
He went on to explain how Larry and I were two characters made out of the same bit of program but kept safely apart in our
different worlds—until I started playing with synchronicity.
“Let me just be sure I’ve got the logic of this,” I said.”
I
drew Larry into
my
world, not myself into his.”
“That is correct.”
“And he took my place in
my
world.”
“Right.”
“So what’s happening in
his
world right now? Is there just a hole where he should be?”
“In his world he’s dead. Killed by the guys who blew your head off. In his world it was
his
head, and
his
body that was dumped in the lime pit.”
“I’m getting a little confused,” I said.”
Was he
murdered in his world, or was it me?”
“He was murdered in his world.”
“But I was murdered in my world, in his place.”
“Correct.”
“So what am I doing here? Why aren’t I dead?”
My view of Dave on the screen was basically just his head and chest, but as I watched he shifted his position and reached
behind him to scratch the buttock on which his weight had previously been resting.
“That’s a little tricky. It’s to do with formal logic, which still applies on one level even in a quantum computer…”
As he droned on, I nodded thoughtfully from time to time to signal some kind of understanding, however abstract, of his words.
There was what looked like a fiberoptic camera at the top of the screen on which I assumed he was watching me from wherever
he was. To be honest, everything he said made perfect sense, and yet was meaningless. Because I had nothing to test it by.
I was in limbo.
The one thing he’d said that had stayed in my mind as some kind of beacon of sanity was his original remark about “talking
me down.” This, I told myself, is just the way you would talk down someone like me—talk them down from the staggering discovery
that life continues unbroken after death. This is the sort of way you would choose, in the circumstances, to talk down a skeptical
science writer—skeptical about everything, including “official” science’s blanket dismissal of all methods and philosophies
that fell outside its limited perspective. This was the way you would talk down such a person after death: by the use of these
metaphors. I had little doubt that was the proper way to regard them—as metaphors. I remember thinking that everybody probably
got their own individual metaphors for the purpose—whichever were appropriate, given their personal interests and preoccupations.
“So what now?” I asked. “You’ve described how this has happened. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to do anything?
Or is this just the status quo from now on?”
“No, it’s not the status quo. We have to take care of the problem that brought you here.”
“My being murdered?”
“The loop. Your character is looped with Larry’s. You’re going to go on running around each other indefinitely, with whatever
minor variations the computer can throw in each time. But nothing will really change. You’ll never break out. You’re locked
in.”
“And what will that mean—being locked in?”
“In a sense it means you’ll go mad. Only it’s worse than mad, because there’s no time, which means you can’t ever die. The
most you can hope for is that our funding runs out and my supervisor pulls the plug on the whole program.”