Out of body experience

Eric’s Hoffman’s soul looked down on his former body.

 

In the madness of the emergency room, with doctors and nurses running around frantically, a junior doctor juggling haplessly with the defibrillator, a machine beeping loudly, Eric was the only one with a sense of proportion.

 

He saw the static lifeline, his lifeline and decided to help. He flew down, from where he was floating on the ceiling, hovered above his deathly body, and pressed his hands against his heart, pushing through the outer skin, into the flesh, and pressing against his heart.

 

He had no idea what he was doing. If he’d stopped to think, he’d have realised that an incorporeal soul couldn’t possible push a physical heart into action, but, for no reason knowable to man, it worked. His heart, massaged into action, began to beat, his lifeline started to wobble into action.

 

‘I’m alive’ thought Eric, ‘soon I’ll be able to re-join my body’, but though Eric’s heart was beating, although Eric was alive again, his soul wasn’t recalled. He hovered over his body unable to enter it, just watching on, a spectral spectator.  He tried climbing inside the body, but just slipped through it, before bouncing back and finding himself in the same spot, roughly three feet above his body.

 

After a while the medical team left, smugly satisfied with their work, although, of course, they had done nothing, it was all the work of Eric’s own spirit.

 

Time passed. Eric got better, the physical Eric, the one lying on the hospital bed. The medical team did their work and the scare of near-death was soon forgotten. Within a few weeks he was ready to leave, but Eric’s soul was still floating above him, unable to return.

 

Eric’s soul watched his body return to its normal life. The body seemed to function perfectly without his soul, which watched on, hovering above Eric as he slept, as he woke, as he made breakfast, as he sat on the sofa watching TV, as he talked to friends, as he made love to his wife. His soul had become a permanent spectator.

 

However, if his soul had found the separation frustrating, that was nothing to the frustration he felt shortly after Eric returned to work, where he had to watch silently from above as Eric lied blatantly to a customer in order to secure a sale. It was the sort of behaviour that Eric had always refused to indulge in, he hated that type of salesman and prided himself on his ethical approach.

 

However, the technique worked, Eric made the sale and continued to lie and cheat his customers and also his colleagues, taking credit for things he hadn’t done, even stealing other people’s lunch from the shared refrigerator. His soul looked on, disgusted but unable to intervene.

 

Within less than a year Eric had been promoted and won a regional sales award. After the awards ceremony Eric got talking to a young saleswoman from Surrey and ended up spending the night in her hotel room. Eric had never had an affair before, but deprived of his soul, he had become a different person. His moral guide had become a hapless spectator, forced to watch hour after hour of adulterous sex, unable to make himself heard, unable to intervene.

 

The affairs continued, as did the new approach to business. With his new-found confidence Eric set up his own business, blatantly poaching clients from his previous employer, and making new contacts, dealings in a seedy underworld that his soul never even knew existed.

 

One day Eric’s soul watched him talking to two very dubious looking characters, both cloaked in black, submerging their faces beneath baseball caps, both wearing the same unkempt beards that partially disguised scarred and lived-in faces. Eric and the men all spoke in whispers so that even his soul, just a few feet above them, could hear nothing of their dealings.

 

Then, one of the men took out what looked like a black sheet, which they unfolded. Eric’s soul was mystified, then the men raised the sheet above Eric’s head. His soul tried to push through the sheeting, to find out what was going on, but the sheeting was soul-proof. Intransient though he was, he was unable to pass through.

 

Eric was deliberately cutting him adrift.

 

The extent to which Eric was cutting his soul adrift would rapidly become apparent. His soul suddenly realised that the men were wrapping the sheeting around him. Before he’d had time to fight, he was completely engulfed in the sheeting. No matter how hard he tried there was no way out – the fabric was completely soul-proof.

 

He felt himself being dragged down to earth and carried. He realised he must be in a car or van as he felt movement, though he could see nothing. He tried again to escape, hoping that some opening had arisen whilst being carried to the car, but there was no way out. He was trapped.

 

The journey was short though and soon he was being carried again. He stayed alert for an opportunity to escape, but not alert enough, as he only realised that a corner of the sheeting had been opened when a huge great stone was thrown into it. The gap immediately disappeared.

 

He had no time to wonder what the stone was for, as he was lifted and the splash as he hit the water, the stone ensuring that he, the sheet and the stone sunk immediately to the bottom of the river, lake, or wherever it was they had been taken.

 

So, he realised, his body had been aware of him, had taken notice of his warnings, his moral guidance. Just not in the way he’d intended.

 

If he had found it frustrating adrift from his own body, here, entrapped in darkness and watery silence, with only a stone for company, it became unbearable. The loneliness and solitude Eric’s soul felt was indescribable. Yet he could do nothing, his non-physical form trapped in physical cage he was unable to escape.

 

There was no way to keep a track of time. He could have been at the bottom of the river for years, for decades. Sometimes a fish would nudge into the sheeting, but that was exciting as life got, there at the bottom of the water.

 

Eric’s soul spend several months in the watery grave, though it felt much longer. Eventually part of the sheeting tore, perhaps a rogue sharp stone, or the wear and tear of the current proving more powerful than his captors had anticipated. Just that fraction of an inch was enough for his soul to squeeze through and it climbed to the surface, back to freedom.

 

Eric’s soul travelled ‘home’, but by the time it reached the house Eric had long gone, with no forwarding address, and even if there had been a forwarding address there was no way he could have asked for it.

 

He went to Eric’s workplace, but as he expected Eric had moved on from here too.

 

He was a lone soul, adrift in the world, with no purpose, no purchase to any physical being, he was lost, a ghost, a spirit, devoid of hope and home.

 

Bereft of his own body, his own life, Eric’s soul could think of only one place to go. To the hospital where he had first become separated from his body.

 

He took up residence in the emergency rooms and operating theatres, where, bored, lacking in purpose, he tasked himself with saving lives, repeating the trick he had used on his own body, pumping the hearts of those patients who found themselves clinically dead.

 

His interventions worked. The hospital became famed for its miracle recoveries, for the high survival rates for high-risk interventions, for the near 100% recovery rate from flat-liners.

 

And here his soul remained, making itself useful, essential even, a kindly spirit, a living miracle.

 

Until, one day, many, many years later, he recognised the figure on the hospital bed below him, the one with the flatline, the one around which nurses and doctors blundered. The face was older, many years older, a long-lived in body, but he could hardly fail to recognise his own body. For Eric had somehow returned to the same hospital to die a second time.

 

Eric’s soul stared at the flat lifeline on the machine, stared at his aged, dying body, started at the medical team trying, failing, to revive him.

 

And for once he decided not to intervene. He decided to wait, to wait to die properly this time.

 

He had lived long enough. It was time to move on.

 

The medical team gave up after a long struggle, their first death of this type in a long, long time. After this, the run of miracles would come to an end and death would soon become routine again, though they would never understand why.