The Threshold

TW: Car accident, death

 I want to tell myself that it isn’t real. The nausea grinding in my solar plexus? Just the byproduct of clinical anxiety. The constant headache? A result of chewing too much gum or an allergy to dust. I want to think that I am depressed, burnt out and exhausted. To think is to believe, my grandmother always warned me. I tell myself what I think is not real. I need to stop believing it.

Why then, I wonder, hand in my pocket, inhaling the cold, am I here?

Because, if I really didn’t believe it, I would be at home in my tiny one-bedroom apartment, curled up under my favorite fuzzy grey blanket with a mug of jasmine green and a book. I would not be standing in four layers of carefully chosen warm clothes, numb from the gusting wind despite them. I am, however, not not doing that. I am, instead, exactly where I am not supposed to be, which is how I died in the first place.

I burrow deeper into this year’s knitted scarf, a tradition I started twenty-three years ago as a way of keeping time inside my mind. Shuddering deep into my clothes, trying to make myself small enough to fit between the misty droplets of early winter snow, I wait. I wait for the car with the driver who drank too much and won’t see me in my dark coat. I wait for the crunch of my bones on the grill of the car and the piercing pain as my body splinters internally from the impact. I wait for the cold of the ground to seep into my fallen form as shock sends me into oblivion even while my consciousness rises to dance with the stars.

I shiver, take a breath.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three…seven, six, five more seconds and then the clock chimes 1:17 A.M. on November the 22nd. Not midnight. Midnight is for the thickening, the moment when the air grows so dense it’s like licking whip cream off a spoon. It tastes sweet and metallic and empty. No, it’s at 1:17 A.M. when the door appears. The world splits apart. Reality bends and folds over and under layering reality on the currents of time. I never opened the door. I knew better. I knew by the howling behind the door and the piercing terror crawling up my back.

Nevertheless, after twenty-five years of feeling myself die, of listening to the screams behind a gate only I can see, and watching myself live out a life I was never meant to live, I have to ask myself…what am I waiting for?

           It’s 1:17 A.M. on November the 22nd. I am standing in the road staring at the gate. It’s a beautiful, elaborate, old gate that would have been better suited to a Victorian garden. Last year was an elevator. I smile despite myself. I am glad that God, or whoever’s playing her, has a sense of humor.

           Time pauses, folds another layer, and I see my lives before me.

           Like always, I never see the car.

*

“So, you didn’t go through the door,” Dr. Margaret Coombs, a.k.a. “Dr. Meg,” says as she stares at me over a cup of tea.

Dr. Meg has been my headshrinker for the last twenty years. About a decade ago. I finally confessed the miserable truth I was hiding.

*

“I’m dead,” I say, sprawling on the beige mediocre leather couch in Dr. Meg’s office. Her office is what you would expect of a therapist’s office. Books-ostensibly from graduate school about different models of therapy-, plants, more plants, a Magic 8 ball, pillows, a coffee stand, some abstract paintings of flowers in muted tones, and the obligatory box of tissues.

“Metaphorically or did you piss off the mob?” Dr. Meg asks. Unlike her office, Dr. Meg is not what you’d expect of a therapist. She has a macaw blue mohawk, enough piercings to pick up satellite radio, and more tattooed skin than not.

I liked her the moment I met her.

“Literally,” I say. I lifted a hand up to stop the inevitable question coming my way. “And I can prove it.”

*

“No, I didn’t go through the gate. I chickened out again, right before going splat on the pavement,” I’m annoyed, so I tug too hard on the yarn for my scarf and the ball pops out to roll around the floor of the office.

“And then you woke up?” Dr. Meg asks, pausing to pick up the ball and put it back in my bag.

“In my bed. Just like the last twenty-five years.” I purl the yarn around my needle as we keep talking, my fingers knowing the pattern by memory.

“That’s a new color,” Dr. Meg observes.

I shrug. “I haven’t done orange before.”

*

My first scarf was purple. I splurged on hand-painted cashmere and made a beautiful ruffle scarf that matched my midnight blue wool peacoat. That was the year I went a little crazy, cocky in my newly found life energy. I ate at fancy restaurants with dishes like “miso-glazed enoki scallops on edamame puree” and bought all the clothes I promised myself one day I would own. I drank too much and ate too much and slept around too much. Life was rich and fleeting and short.

Year one was a decadent year.

*

“How do you feel about waking up again?” Dr. Meg asks. “At the risk of asking a stereotypical therapy question.”

I smile slightly and slip the yarn from one needle to the next. “Does it count as a stereotypical therapy question when your client is a zombie ghost?”

Dr. Meg laughs. “Fair.” She pauses and I know she’s doing the therapy thing where she waits me out until I answer her question. We’ve been doing this dance for twenty years, each year her growing older while I stayed the same. Her macaw mohawk was now a more reserved Cruella De Vil that accentuated her natural silver with heavily dyed midnight locks.

It was strange, this dance between us. Of all the people in the world, Dr. Meg was the only one who seemed connected to my story, who could see me every year, even if she didn’t exactly remember on November the 23^rd. Sometimes, she wrote herself notes.

*

“Look in your files,” I say, when Dr. Meg inevitably asks me about my ‘proof.’ “How many Gwenyth Chambers do you have?”

“Four,” she replies, slowly pulling the files from her locked cabinet. She opens them carefully, tenderly, as if afraid of what she will find.

She doesn’t speak for a long time. When she does, it makes me laugh for the first time since I died.

“Holy shit,” she says. “You really are dead.”

*

I sigh and feel the burn of tears I stopped crying a long time ago. I lay my knitting on my lap and stare at the ceiling, make faces from the dots in the popcorn texture. “No, I didn’t try calling my mom. She wouldn’t remember me anyway.”

No one remembers me.

*

My mother was an obligatory mother, giving birth to me as a way of appeasing my conservative grandparents and assuring them their legacy would continue onto the next generation. She married my father, had me, divorced him, and disappeared into the ether. Over the coming years, she would only emerge long enough to lecture me about love while burning down a cigarette.

“Don’t ever let them tell you what to do with your life, baby girl, y’hear? You fly as hard and fast as you can. And don’t go having children. They’ll just anchor you down.”

I used to think she meant I was heavy, so I only ever wore my lightest dresses and met her barefoot on account I never wanted to carry extra weight, and I didn’t need shoes anyhow. Not that it mattered. She would be gone again as soon as the cigarette was out and she got a few hundred dollars from my grandparents to move on to her next adventure.

No, my mother never remembered me. Even when we were both alive.

*

“Gwenyth,” Dr. Meg says. She’s holding a cup of cocoa she’s made for me. It’s just the right temperature for drinking. She even added twelve marshmallows, the perfect number.

“It’s okay.” I smile and take the cocoa. I want to stop her sympathy with my words. I toss my new scarf to the side of me. I curl a little tighter into the plaid fleece blanket she keeps on her couch. “It’s just, it’s not like I’m just dead, you know. It’s like,” I pause. “It’s like I never existed in the first place.”

“I know.”

“What is it I’m supposed to be doing here, Meg?” There is lifetimes of exhaustion in my voice.

It’s a question we’ve both asked a thousand times.

“I feel as if I’ve tried everything,” I say, closing my eyes.

*

Year five was the worst. Year five was austere. After dying five times over and spending the resulting years in variable states of chaos, I knew it was time to try something different. I shaved my head, became a vegan, studied yoga and Zen Buddhism, and sold all my worldly possessions. I volunteered countless hours at animal shelters and food banks. I meditated for months. I gave up alcohol, sex, and pot. Life was simple and strict and structured.

Year five sucked.

It sucked. And I still died.

*

“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” Dr. Meg says.

“Mmmm?” I ask around a mouthful of marshmallow.

“You always go back to the place of the accident, right?”

I nod. “It doesn’t matter where I am, I always wind up back there. I don’t even fight it anymore.”

“And then the gate appears.”

“Yup,” I say, waiting for the revelation I’m skeptical will come.

“And then the accident happens…”

“Splat. Yup. Tracking so far. What’s the thought?”

Dr. Meg gets up and goes over to her desk where she pulls out a one-inch binder. Inside, she has clippings from newspapers, and later, online blogs and news channels.

“I’ve been collecting these for a while now. Take a look.”

I lick the spoon and plop it back into the remains of the cocoa, leaning forward. The clippings all detail the accident. Some are longer, more graphic, and include information about the “Jane Doe” found dead in the street. Some are just notations from police scanners. Some are references in editorials arguing for better traffic control in the neighborhood and increased use of salting trucks.

“Woah,” I say. “These are all of me.”

“Ah huh, twenty-five years. I had to go to the library and dig up some microfiche, if you can believe it.”

I laugh shortly. “Bullshit. I’m not that old.”

My hands touch the articles reverently. Each article is written in the present, as if the accident wasn’t happening over and over again each year, as if each year it’s a surprise and a unique tragedy, rather than the same tragedy with a skip in the record. “It’s amazing,” I say. “It’s like time just keeps going forward, but I’m stuck. Like there’s two different timelines but I’m not part of either one.”

“I know,” Dr. Meg says, and I get a creepy crawly feeling up my spine.

I raise my brown eyes to her green ones over the black and white newspaper filings. I could feel it, a sense of thickening, of the crackle of realization sizzling between us. I flip quickly through the articles. Jane Doe. Jane Doe. Jane Doe.

“All these articles, all this time,” Dr. Meg says. “It’s all about the Jane Doe. About you.”

I freeze. I know what she’s going to ask. It’s the question neither of us has thought to ask about before, too caught up in the narcissistic wonder of instant reincarnation.

“Gwen, what happened to the driver?”

*

It’s 1:10 A.M. on November the 22^nd, twenty-six years after the first time I died. I’m standing in my midnight blue coat, gazing up at the stars. My orange scarf is bright and contrasts with the dark blue. I look like a deep winter sky. It’s a beautiful clear night, unseasonably warm, the air crisp but not cold. It smells of old leaves, wet earth, and the turning of the seasons. Autumn of ’26 was a good time, a perfect fall. And this time, I’m determined to do things differently.

1:15 A.M and I hear the distant sound of a motor running. It’s funny that I’ve never paid attention to it before. I gaze at the car. Its headlights aren’t on, which is weird for early, so early in the morning. The car is going fast, swerving slightly, unsteady on the roads.

1:17 A.M, the waver of the worlds begins and there’s a thrum of energy as the veil between times cracks open like an egg, spilling my fate out across the threshold. Time folds over and under itself. The gate appears. This year, it’s a beautiful door, a rich oak wood painted in Romanian style, brightly colored delicate whorls of flowers and swirls. I hear the cries from behind the door and feel a pang of despair enter my heart.

There’s pain behind that door. A reckoning.

I take a step back, my feet padding softly on the pavement. The car is going to hit me, and I will die again, but this time, I will see the face of the person who took me from this world. I hold my breath without meaning to, feel the tension seize the back of my neck in anticipation.

I turn, and I face the driver for the first time, their features just observable in the dim streetlights, the neon of street signs reflecting against their jewelry and tattoos, which are far less than I would come to know over the course of years.

In an instant, it all becomes clear.

The gate isn’t there for me.

It never was.

*

I am standing on the side of the road, staring at my crumpled body, the ruined coat, the blood-stained scarf. I feel a pang of recognition and gaze down upon that body with a surprising gratitude. I have a ringing in my ears, which I first think are the voices behind the door, but I quickly realize that’s not the source of the sound.

I turn and look towards the source of the ringing and realize it’s the electric sound of a car smashed into a telephone pole. The light is flickering, its energy flow disturbed by the red mass of disjointed metal wrapped around its solar plexus.

A figure emerges from the car. She stumbles a little and turns back to look at the accident with a horrified look on her face.

“Don’t look at yourself,” I say softly. “It only makes it worse.”

The woman I know as Dr. Meg steps out of the car. She’s younger than I know her. She stares at me.

“Am I dead?”

“Yep,” I say. “We both are.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she wails, and starts to sob.

I realize what this has been about.

Twenty-six years and one instant. Twenty-six years to see the what-could-have-been’s and to fix the should-haves and would-be’s.

“No,” I say. “But you did, Meg.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“You’ve been my therapist for fifteen years. Twenty, if you count the years I didn’t tell you I was dead.”

She walks towards me, her youthful face no more than mid-twenties, her eyes bloodshot and weary.

“I graduated today. From graduate school. I was out celebrating and lost track of things.”

I nod. "You were a good healer, Meg. Better than the person who graduated today and lost track of things."

Her eyes well up with tears again. She turns to the door, winces at the howling.

“Is that for me?”

I nod again.

“I understand. Thank you,” she says softly.

“For what?”

“For waiting for me. I’m sorry. So sorry.”

“I know.” I smile at her. “Come on,” I say. “It’s getting late.”

Meg takes my outstretched hand. I feel a sense of rightness, of the energy shifting, of the world spinning back into place. She would have been a great therapist. I would have been a great client. If life had been different.

But it wasn’t.

Still...she helped me. Really, she did.

It was time to return the favor.

1:18 A.M. on November the 22^nd.

Holding hands, we walk through the door.