“Oh,” Lydia cried. “My body, then, where is it? It must be buried.”

“No. Cremated,” Lawrence said. “Mine too. We decided on that ahead of time.”

“Usually you have to wait till you’re really fed up with your body,” Mariah said. “I mean, it just gets so it doesn’t work right. See my body over there? It still likes to eat. I mean, it still wants to … and up to a certain point, a body has its rights.”

“Mine fights back,” Cromwell said. He stood there looking very elegant and dapper, staring at it. “I tried to bow out twice, but it just mobilized itself and pulled through. So you have to give it credit, in a way. I’ll just have to ride it out; and while it lasted, it was a great body.”

“But I just went all at once,” Lawrence said. “I thought everyone did. No, of course, Lydia didn’t even know when she died. I knew. I felt a twinge of regret, I suppose, when I left my body on the park bench—with Lydia’s help. I knew I didn’t want to get old in it, or I didn’t want it to get old. But now I wonder: there was still a lot of vitality in it. I’d made up my mind, though, half without knowing. That must have made the difference.”

“Die and learn,” Mariah said, grinning. “But seriously, Lydia, Tweety’s been looking for you.”

Cromwell interrupted, “I tried to help you when you died, Lydia, but you wouldn’t let me—”

“That’s all right,” Lydia said. “But who is Tweety?”

“I don’t know,” Mariah said. “Maybe she has something to do with … well, the classes we attend. We pretty much understand what’s going on around here, and we help the other people as they begin to operate independently of their bodies, like Cromwell tried to help you. Now we’re pretty certain that the classes are hallucinatory in some way, but real in another way. The things we learn are certainly real enough. We think that perhaps the room, the teachers, and so forth are just images or projections for our benefit, so we’ll understand—”

“But the fact is, we’re deciding if we want to be born again, and if so, under what circumstances,” Cromwell said. “And we’re learning that we can’t intellectualize everything.”

“You certainly sound more educated than you did,” Lydia said. “You used to say ‘ain’t’ all the time.”

“You were a bit of a snob, in your way,” Cromwell said.

Lydia sighed. “I suppose I was.”

“Well, you’d better find Tweety. She was around when you were here before. Once I tried to tell you,” Mariah said.

“I do recall a voice once….” Lydia stopped, then said, “But Cromwell, if you want to … die, why won’t your body let you?”