Theorem

I lay upon my bed and urged my soul upward. I wanted to get out. I wanted to see the world from the other side. I wanted proof.

One-bedroom basement suite in a little winter house. Four hundred dollars a month. This was Edmonton, 1998. The furnace burned endlessly to keep the upstairs suite from freezing. Because it was minus thirty some days, it necessarily remained tropical downstairs. But the heat was welcome. I lived in my boxer shorts. No shirt. Skinny. Pencil crayons and an ashtray on the kitchen table. A Nirvana mixtape in the bathroom.

I figured I’d do a minor in religious studies but the only course I enrolled in that semester was 247—witchcraft and the occult. Sherri had told me about it. That was my buddy’s big sister. A third year. Wise and sisterly. She was taking nursing and one of her psychology textbooks had a section titled “The Benefits of Marijuana and Pregnancy.” And she was the first person who ever said to me, “I’m not religious; I’m spiritual.”

I bought a book on astral projection for my term paper. It said, in order to willingly shed my corporeal shell, I first needed to achieve a state of alert relaxation. Adventures Beyond the Body. Like I had to get my skin and bones to fall asleep and all the while keep my mind active. There were plenty of techniques, with the promised reward no less than enlightenment. I lit a candle and wedged it into a brass holder from the dollar store. I held a stick of incense in the flame. Sandalwood. 

Finally, I got to the stage the book described. At least I thought I did. My body was relaxed, maybe sleeping, but I was lying there and thinking and thinking and feeling. My sense of touch and place were distorted. Fuzzy everywhere. I felt like I was half inside the mattress and half above it. Vibrations were increasing and sure I was relaxed but I was also coiled taut. There was pressure building somewhere behind my eyes. Building and building and then—bang. Something broke. Something inside me. This was what I’d been waiting for, but it was so exciting that I lost all concentration and wiggled my big toe.

That was it. The room rushed back.

Validation

There was a coin-operated toy dispenser inside the supermarket entrance. They used to be everywhere, but I never see them much these days, or maybe I don’t notice them anymore. But this old one, from somewhere circa age nine or ten, was one of the biggies. Towering because I was closer to the ground back then. Multiple vats each dispensing artefacts like bouncy balls and silly putty, and if there were treats, they were something significant like golf-ball-sized jawbreakers. 

But on this particular day I was after a friendship bracelet. 

We called them friendship bracelets because you were supposed to make them or buy them for a friend, and when you tied one around someone’s wrist, they would make a wish. The wish would hold tight inside the knot, and the day the knot finally loosened and came apart was the day the wish was set free. But the bracelets were also a fashion item. If you had ten or so around one wrist you looked pretty cool, or so we reckoned, and maybe you even looked popular since you must have obtained at least some of them in a legitimate friendship exchange. 

I had no selfless thoughts of reciprocity. Front and centre was the wickedest friendship bracelet I’d ever seen. It wasn’t made of anything unusual, nor was its weave different from the norm. It was just the perfect colour combination—black, red, yellow, and a deep purple. I had never before seen such complementary tones. I was at once thrilled to have found it and dejected at how far up inside the dispenser it was. I couldn’t see its twin in the nest of plastic spheres. For all I knew, it was unique.

“God,” I whispered. I looked side to side, then closed my eyes and bowed my head. “God, I know I shouldn’t pray for anything so stupid. Prayers are supposed to be serious, saved for big problems or sicknesses or for asking you to watch over people far away. So I hope what I’m about to pray for isn’t a sin, and I promise, I will never ask for something so small and unimportant ever again…

“Please, if it’s not too much to ask, please God, can I have a bracelet like this one at the front? It’s so nice and I’ve never seen one like it before, so if it’s not a sin, please…”

I unclenched my palm and caught a clammy coin between my fingers. I reached out hesitantly, fearfully. I put the quarter in the slot and turned the cat-wheel crank. The mechanism swallowed my payment, clicked, and clunked. The sanctum of plastic spheres shifted as my prize dropped down the chute and appeared at the translucent door.

I lifted the flap and let the godsend out. My prayer had been answered. 

Inference

It was a dream. Damien and I were walking down the hallway of an apartment building, side by side. The hallway went on for miles. All the doors were closed.

“I have so much to tell you,” I said. I knew I hadn’t seen him in a while, but I hadn’t yet processed why.

I babbled as we walked. I kept looking up at him and his face was so serene. So calm. Caring, maybe, but also uninvolved. He was staring straight ahead.

The hallway never ended. The building had to be massive. We finally reached the corner, went left, and continued. The next turn was out of sight.

I have this all down in notes, scribbled before dawn, from back when I still kept a dream journal. It says 4:26 in the upper-right margin. The writing scrawls at first, letters looping and sloppy—a combination of haste and sleepy delirium.

I can see where I stopped to consider the dream. I must have sat up and rubbed my eyes, or maybe I took a deep breath. There’s a space and then the writing changes—clear and purposeful. I wrote: This is important. Then the dream narration continues.

“You’d love her”—I told Damien about my new dog. Big, tough, just like him. But not a fighter. At least she’d never start a fight, right, just like him. “I’m working at a call centre now”—it was okay, a big crazy place, but I was getting close to a promotion, I was sure of it. “I finally finished that book you recommended, what was it, Wizard’s First Rule,” I said. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t love it, but the whole time I was reading, I kept thinking that you were there now, in that world you loved so much.”

I looked up at him and knew at that moment, remembered, that he was dead.

Damien smiled then, just a bit, and just in the lips. His eyes were round and glistening. Mournful. I knew his sadness was for me. Because I was still trapped. I was still stuck down here, pressed by the weight of matter and its million certainties.

Paradigm

Mom picked me up from Fultonvale Junior High the day I had my first private trumpet lesson. As soon as I climbed into the car, though, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s eyes were puffed red. She looked at me for less than a second and her tears flowed anew. 

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

She put the car into drive, hung her head, shifted back into park, and broke into shuddering sobs. I sat quietly, horror building, flash imaginings of the bleakest scenarios.

“It’s Nicole,” Mom said at last.

“Nicky?” I never called my sister by her proper name.

“No,” she said. “Not Nicky. Little Nicole.”

“Oh.” I waited.

“That poor family…” Mom said. “She’s dead. Little Nicole is dead.”

At this she reached over and grabbed me, pulled me into her. I didn’t know if she was holding me for my own shock, or if I was meant to be holding her.

“Sandra was sick in bed with pneumonia. Nicole went outside to play on the jungle gym in the backyard. Christopher was at school. There was a duffle bag with a drawstring hanging from the swing-set. Mark had been putting the kids inside it and swinging them around. Nicole got up there by herself and tried to climb inside the bag…”

My breath stuck. Chest cavernous. Mom cursed and sniffed and wiped at her face. Then, in a moment of sober social responsibility, she blew her nose and declared that I couldn’t be late for my lesson. The tears stopped. The car bumped across the gravel parking lot, out onto the cracked township road. The entire way into Sherwood Park, I kept wondering why I wasn’t crying.

The trumpet lesson was to take place in a backroom of the Good News Moravian Church. I’d never been there before, nor had I even heard of it. The lumpy sod lawn and shining white siding suggested the building was new. The big front doors were unlocked, but when we went in and announced our arrival, no one responded. We waited in the expansive lobby and perused the walls—bulletin boards with bible-study announcements, notices about upcoming events, the finalists of a Sunday school colouring contest, photos from an afternoon picnic. 

“Welcome.” We turned around to see a middle-aged man in a shirt, tie, and jeans, standing in an adjacent doorway. “You must be here for the music lesson. Randal is just downstairs setting up. My name is Pastor Mike.”

He walked over with arm extended. He shook our hands in turn, but all the while he stared concernedly at my mother.

“Is everything alright?” 

“Yes.” Mom cleared her throat. “Well, no. It isn’t. We had an unexpected death.”

“Why don’t you go downstairs and meet Mr. Noyes.” Pastor Mike squeezed my shoulder and released me. He turned back to my mother and held his hands out to her, palms up. “Would you like to sit down? We can talk, if you like, or we can sit quietly and pray together.”

Mom blinked out three more tears, nodded, and followed him into the chapel.

When I came back upstairs thirty minutes later, she was alone in the front-most pew, aglow in the day’s dying light. I walked to the front and touched her arm, waking her.

“I think we should come back here,” Mom said as we got in the car. “Not just for trumpet lessons. But some Sunday, we should come see what it’s like.”

Yes, I thought, this makes sense, like I had come to the same conclusion myself. I felt something, like maybe God was living there, or even just hope. I felt something that hadn’t existed beneath the high ceilings of the United Church. I felt something unusual in the pastor, too, unusual but appealing. 

“And he said they have quite an active youth group,” she added, whether for communion or community.

Intermediary

The rain flicked at puddles a few feet away, but here under the trellised overhang, among the withering rose vine, outside the university chapel, we were dry. 

Dr. Botting exhaled slowly, letting the smoke slide out of her mouth and nostrils. The autumn air thickened and pulled her breath into a twist of wind and leaves and darkness. A cloak over a shawl over a seven-layer dress—all billowing. Veins and sunspots on the back of her hand. Long fingernails, unpainted. Long white hair with a dozen strands still silver. She was chaplain and priestess and crone.

And we—a dozen disciples—waited with nervous murmurs and glances, underdressed in bored slacks, t-shirts, wool sweaters, and rain shells. But we weren’t the cabal, the inner circle: these three stood further away and chattered confidently, a half pitch louder than necessary, like this is my world, this is my coven, you can see that I belong here. And these, the self-proclaimed: a young bard and his lady, all in black, and the crone’s husband, massive and nose-whistling in a buffalo-sized rain slick.

Dr. Botting extinguished her cigarette into the receptacle’s wet sand, only half smoked, and led us inside. We waited in the lobby, whispering and craning necks as they prepared the ritual. The chapel seats had been moved to the edges of the room, with a small cauldron in the centre, circled in ivy and set upon cinder blocks. The crone retrieved a willow broom and began circling the cauldron, widdershins, mock-sweeping the floor, scattering any remnants of negative thought. The crone’s husband and the bard tended the four corners—north and south, east and west, for earth and fire, air and water. The bard’s lady stood at the entrance to the circle with a bottle of ointment in one hand and a smouldering coil of sage in the other. She motioned for us to queue.

“Thou art the goddess,” she said. “Turn, turn.” She traced the air around us, washed us with smoke. And last, before we could enter, she drew a pentagram on each of our foreheads with the lavender salve. “Thou art the god.” 

I followed, mid-train, watching every other movement and glance, afraid to misstep. I had only been to two previous gatherings, and both of those had been full-moon rituals. Less elaborate by half. One by one we entered the circle, observing the now clockwise flow of energy. We beckoned the cardinal points with call-and-response evocations. We summoned the elementals to protect us. The crone poured an ounce of lighter fluid into the caldron and then danced in backward pirouettes, stiffly, about the flames. And then, when the cone of power was deemed secure, we turned our attention to the next world.

“Tonight, on the eve of Samhain, the veil between worlds is thinnest. This is our moment to reach out, to commune directly with those who have crossed over…”

A few people spoke, softly at first, names like Thomas and Nancy and Nana and Father, and then rising to a more appropriate moan of mourning, louder, with more voices joining in, I love you and I miss you, louder still and wailing, Nicole and Damian and Douglas and Meesha, wailing, then moans again, then sighs, to the last whisperings with heads all bowed.

And later, on my walk home, I wondered at the heaviness in my chest. It wasn’t for the doleful farewells, mine or theirs, but for the certainty I’d seen in the faces around me.

Corroboration

Public transit eavesdropping: “You think everywhere you live is haunted,” someone said. 

Three potential hypotheses, I thought, because I’d heard similar accusations. One—unreliable sensory and/or emotional data resulting in paranoia; two—enhanced perception aka mediumship or psychic sensitivity; or three, and most immediately plausible—normal, reliable perception in a city rampant with actual hauntings. Next object for analysis: ghostly phenomena as undead visitation versus historical echoes of extreme emotional intensity.

It was 2001, Victoria, and the rental market was drowning in students. Apartment hunting was warfare. So it was weird, then, that the suite I went to see on the tenth was already vacant, and had been empty a few months. The landlord said this like it was nothing. Bonus—no rent until the first, and I could move in immediately. 

There was a slash of dark red on the ceiling near the kitchen that I reassuringly blamed on a previous tenant’s misadventure with ketchup. But then I discovered a maroon spatter on the bathtub overflow drain that was more difficult to explain. There was an odd smell that may have arrived in retrospect, but I left the balcony door cracked for the rest of that month. 

Three times after I’d moved in, I saw someone sitting on my futon, but only from my peripheral vision. Easy to dismiss. The first time was a perceptive glitch, and then the idea was in my head. But then things started to go missing, things I was actively using, only to reappear exactly where I’d left them. For example, I’d be making soup, have the ladle on the counter, and then turn around, the ladle was gone. And gone for a week. Then it would be back on the counter beside the stove. Or I’d take a CD from the rack, leaving the gem case open on top of the stereo. Come back to change the music, and the gem case was gone. Again, for a few days, and then it would be back, impossibly.

This culminated in the disappearance of my ring. I’d bought this ring from a curb-side drug dealer five years earlier in the Zona Rosa of Bogotá, Colombia. All the silver had peeled off. It was corroded copper and turned my finger sickly green. I wore it constantly, except for when I was at the computer—I’d sit down, take off my watch, take off my ring, and set both beside the keyboard. So when I got up to leave and couldn’t find my ring, not anywhere, I had a shifty incorporeal suspect in mind.

“Did anything else ever go missing?” My girlfriend Marie was over, helping me clean for the inspection. It was August 31st—we were moving in together. 

“No,” I said. “The last few months have been quiet.”

We were in the bathroom. I was bleaching the toilet. She was wiping under the sink. The kitchen and living room were empty and shining. The bedroom too, but for the box-spring and mattress, saved for the last load along with a tote of cleaning supplies. 

“Shame about my ring,” I added. “I’d hoped it would show up.”

No stone unturned. 

I gave the toilet a final swipe, stood, peeled off my rubber gloves, dropped them into the rag bucket, and walked into the bedroom.

There, dead-centre on the bare mattress, against all reason, was my ring.

Methodology

Age 22. Damien was my best friend. He was this giant thug who cried at Disney films, the perfect helper on moving day, and the first guy I had really connected with since high school. I met Damien at work—we were an unlikely pair of carriage drivers. Unlikely because we were both new to Victoria and because neither of us had significant horse experience. And Damien a bit more unlikely as he’d just gotten out of jail.

“I’ll never touch a Ouija board again,” I said.  

Damien was insistent. He was thrilled by my Ouija-board stories, believed me unquestioningly, even though I recounted an ancient past. 

“I’ll show you how,” I said. “But I’m not touching it.”

So the plan was to assemble a homemade board—the planchette devised from an empty box of playing cards with an arrow drawn in one corner; the letters, numbers, yes, and no were cut-out scraps of paper taped to the kitchen table, just as my mother had shown me in ninth grade. Marie would be Damien’s partner in mediumship. I was to observe.

But the planchette didn’t respond for them. Not really. They experienced the usual start—tingly hands, quivering random movements of the small box beneath their fingertips. But rather than move in response to their questions, the planchette instead inched a slow creeping path across the table, pushing outside the circle of letters and numbers, toward where I sat. They stopped and moved the planchette back into the centre. Again it ignored their questions and instead wiggled in my direction.

“Whoever’s there,” Damien said. “Do you want him to put his hand on the box?”

The planchette shot backward with the arrow pointing directly at yes. Damien was ecstatic. I was horrified. I took a deep breath and reached into the middle of the table.

“Who are we speaking to?”

“K-H-A-H-I-L.”

“Khahil Gilbran?” I laughed, but stopped when I looked at Damien. His smile had dropped away.

“No,” he said. “I know who it is…”

Damien explained that a good friend of his from Penticton had died on Okanagan Lake. He hadn’t attended the funeral because he’d been in prison. Khahil’s body was never found.

“Khahil, is that why you’re still here? Are you waiting until someone finds you?”

“No.” We sat in silence as the longer answer was spelled out. “I-M-W-A-I-T-I-N-G-F-O-R-Y-O-U.”

Damien paled. I tried to reassure him. Time probably had no bearing on the other side, I said. I’d read that in at least two different metaphysical paperbacks. The message didn’t portend anything immediate. Khahil might plan on waiting for years. For a lifetime.

But my tragic friend said, as he would, that he never expected to see age thirty. There was a curse on the men in his direct line for a crime three generations stale. None of them had ever lived to see the birth of their first child. His own father had died—had been murdered, possibly—in a scuba accident a month before Damien was born.

And so the following year went like this: Damien was fired after a bar fight that left him so wounded he couldn’t walk, let alone drive a horse through downtown traffic. He started dating a carriage driver who was allergic to latex. A month later she was pregnant. He robbed a few small convenience stores to make rent. He started selling weed downtown. His girlfriend gave him an ultimatum—turn it around or we’re through. And on the night she finally gave up, said enough is enough, Damien took a handful of pills and ran crazed into the night. He was already dead when the ambulance arrived at the hospital.

Baby Khahil Damien was born the following spring.

Corollary

We were well into the age of compact disks, but the recordings I found and purchased on the fledgling internet came as cassettes. 

I worked early the next day, tech support something, and Marie worked late. I took the cassette out of the little black stereo in the bedroom and flipped it to side B. Another guided meditation. Have an out-of-body experience within 30 days. I’d been listening to the tapes almost nightly for two months. My inability to achieve astral projection, I reasoned, was either down to my chronic weed consumption, or to my uncanny ability to fall asleep in less than a minute.

I crawled into bed as a tempered, tenor voice filled the room. I fell asleep immediately. 

But then I woke up. Or at least I thought I did. 

Picture this: I’m standing beside the bed. To my immediate right is the bedroom door, which opens into the living room—television, coffee table, cold fireplace, futon. The front door occupies the right-hand wall of the living room, as does a double window that looks out onto a small patio.

I’m standing there with no memory of getting out of bed. But I don’t wonder about this. My mind is perfectly clear, just observation, with no thoughts crowding in at the edges. Stark vacancy. I turn and take two steps until I’m facing into the living room. I hear the latch on the patio gate. Marie’s head appears at the window. It’s dark and wet outside. She turns and closes the gate. She walks past the windows and I hear her keys turn the deadbolt. She opens the door and steps inside. She looks right at me—not through me. We have this stunning, fleeting moment of eye contact. Marie gasps.

A second later I flashed into normal, waking awareness. I was back in bed. Still in bed. I was buried beneath the down duvet. I heard the front door slam. Marie ran into the bedroom and turned on the light.

“Were you just…” She stared, gaping. “I just saw you. When I walked in you were standing there, and then you just… disappeared.”

The cassette still turned in the stereo, but the recording had finished. Like how the proof I’d sought would be an end to searching.

“I think I finally did it,” I said.