Chapters (38)
After a few minutes of silence, I heard Ed’s voice through an underwater speaker. It actually startled me.
“You should be nice and relaxed now,” he said.
“Mmmyeah,” I croaked.
“Good. Now I want you to go back to the moment of one of your shifts. Imagine it deeply.”
So I tried. And got nothing. The thing is, the jumps were both instantaneous and not. Like being under anesthesia. You know the “after” is different from the “before,” but you can’t access the in-between.
“This is pointless.”
“Just keep trying.”
I sighed and moved slightly, feeling the water ripple around my body. I felt myself getting tense, so I forced my limbs to relax again. Then my mind started to ping on something. You know how sometimes you unexpectedly trigger the memory of a dream you had? Not even a recent one, but one you had maybe years ago, but never remembered until that moment? That’s what this was like. The in-between was there—I just had to relax into it.
Soon I was there again. The “Elsewhere,” as the Edwards called it. I remembered flashes of light and sound. Uneven, like Morse code. There was an indescribable sense of movement. I was moving left and right, back and forth all at once.
“I got something,” I rasped. “I got something!”
“Slow it down,” Ed said. “Take it in. Let the feeling linger. What’s around you?”
But my mind was already drifting, and I was now seeing cheeseburgers in my head, because I was hungry. I told them, and they didn’t seem as exasperated as I thought they would be.
“That’s how your mind is interpreting the realities,” Ed said. “Just go with it. Pick a burger.”
“Which one?”
“The best-tasting one.”
“How do I know how it tastes before I pick it?”
This is the moment that Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke to use the Force. But somehow choosing an imaginary cheeseburger seemed like an absolute waste of a Jedi Master’s time.
I chose one. But I didn’t get to eat it—because it devoured me first. The moment it was chosen, it enveloped me. Its meat was rancid. Fetid. Disgusting, but it was too late to escape, because I had lost control. Then I realized that I was reliving my arrival in this world. I remembered that sense of foreboding when I snapped back to the field after I tackled the quarterback. I knew it was bad, even before I knew how bad.
I leapt up almost involuntarily, knocked open the lid, and spilled out onto the floor beside the tank, dripping wet and out of breath.
“Well,” Ed said. “It looks like you had a breakthrough.”