The Businessman by Thomas M. Disch

Author:Thomas M. Disch [Disch, Thomas M.]
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-31T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

4

There was another world off at an angle from the world she'd known till now, that world six feet above her full of its cars and its houses. Sometimes this other world seemed to be inside her, but when she would reverse her attention inward and try to approach the threshold to that dimly sensed world within, it would go out of focus or fade, though never did it disappear entirely. It was always there, as real as the furniture one stumbles over in a dark room.

Her first clear view of it came in a flash. She saw, across the threshold, a field of pure geometry and color, like a painting that was simultaneously flat on the ground and covering every wall. It bore a general resemblance to a red gingham tablecloth, except that it wavered and the bands of red were just as bright, in their way, as the patches of white, which in fact weren't really white but some other, indefinable color. It seemed incredibly beautiful and important, but before she could grasp why, it was gone.

Afterward she speculated a great deal as to what it was that she had seen, but always, though she could recall quite clearly the look of it, its _sense_ eluded her. Patience: that was the first lesson of the afterlife. Patience unmeasured by calendar or clock, or even by the cadences of articulated thought. Most of her subjective time went by in flows of low-level sentience, such as one slips into, in life, only at the edge of sleep. No telling how long these periods of spiritual sleep had lasted. They might be ten-minute dozes; just as likely she might have slept away an entire winter like a seed in frozen ground. Sometimes the constellations of hungers creeping in the soil above her would have completely altered when she awakened, or the liquifying tissues of her dead body would have entered upon some new and more drastic stage of disintegration.

Impossible, even as a spirit divorced from flesh, not to regard these transformations without aversion. Impossible not to strain against that still unbroken linkage that kept her here, sealed in this coffin like a genie in a jug. Not, however, with any sense of dread; rather, she regarded her corpse as she would, in the world above, have reacted to some derelict on Hennepin Avenue, who smells and whose clothes are in rags and whom no one can help even if help had been asked for.

Once it seemed that she had actually won free. A tendon of the corpse's flesh, drying, had tugged a bone out of its socket: it was that sudden popping out she'd thought to be the breaking of the lock. And perhaps it did signal, in a small way, the beginning of her liberation, for afterward the horizon of her awareness seemed greatly enlarged. She came to have an almost panoramic sense of the cemetery grounds -- not just the sphere of earth immediately about her but beyond that, to where the other corpses lay and decayed.

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