And he thinks, with the wonder of a child:This is the last thought I’ll ever have. This is goodbye.

Then he is falling.

Seventeen

Callahan stopped and looked at Jake, almost shyly. “Do you remember it?” He asked. “The actual…” He cleared his throat. “The dying?”

Jake nodded gravely. “You don’t?”

“I remember looking at Michigan Avenue from between my new shoes. I remember the sensation of standing there—seeming to, anyway—in the middle of a snow flurry. I remember Sayre behind me, yelling in some other language. Cursing. Words that guttural just about had to be curses. And I remember thinking, He’s frightened . That was actually my last thought, that Sayre was frightened. Then there was an interval of darkness. I floated. I could hear the chimes, but they were distant. Then they came closer. As if they were mounted on some engine that was rushing toward me at terrible speed.

“There was light. I saw light in the darkness. I thought I was having the Kübler-Ross death experience, and I went toward it. I didn’t care where I came out, as long as it wasn’t on Michigan Avenue, all smashed and bleeding, with a crowd standing around me. But I didn’t see how that could happen. You don’t fall thirty-three stories, then regain consciousness.

“And I wanted to get away from the chimes. They kept getting louder. My eyes started to water. My ears hurt. I was glad I still had eyes and ears, but the chimes made any gratitude I might have felt pretty academic.

“I thought, I have to get into the light, and I lunged for it. I…”

Eighteen

He opens his eyes, but even before he does, he is aware of a smell. It’s the smell of hay, but very faint, almost exhausted. A ghost of its former self, you might say. And he? Is he a ghost?

He sits up and looks around. If this is the afterlife, then all the holy books of the world, including the one from which he himself used to preach, are wrong. Because he’s not in heaven or hell; he’s in a stable. There are white wisps of ancient straw on the floor. There are cracks in the board walls through which brilliant light streams. It’s the light he followed out of the darkness, he thinks. And he thinks,It’s desert light . Is there any concrete reason to think so? Perhaps. The air is dry when he pulls it into his nostrils. It’s like drawing the air of a different planet.

Maybe it is, he thinks . Maybe this is the Planet Afterlife.