To Know a Veil

by Andrew Akers

It was 3:19 PM when I died. It was a Tuesday.

Sorry for hitting you with that right out of the gate. It’s important we stay on the same page, and me dying is an integral part of that. No, I didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. I didn’t find myself in a train tunnel or standing before Gates of White either. To be honest, the whole thing was rather disappointing.

I was taking down Christmas lights after a long winter. The sun was shining; neighbors were walking by with dogs and baby strollers; I was listening to an audiobook about plants. There was an itch on my right butt cheek where my eczema occasionally flared up. I went to scratch it, the ladder shifted and, well, Newton was onto something with the apples-falling-from-trees thing. 

I didn’t feel the impact, which probably means my landing was pretty gnarly. There was no longer a sun, neighbors, lights or — and here’s the silver lining —  itch. Even my audiobook stopped mid-sentence, forever leaving me with the question of how to properly water petunias. If, in the beginning, there was only The Word, the same could be said of the end and…whatever this place is. That word: Boring.  

I had been knocked senseless. Literally. When I was an edgy teen and everything was #deep, I went through a meditation, Cheech-and-Chong, one-with-the-universe phase. I would burn incense, listen to calming whale noises, partake of the Devil’s lettuce and frequent a place in my city called, On the Float. On the Float charged me fifty dollars a pop to spend ninety minutes in a sensory deprivation tank. Many a weekend were spent cutting old folks' grass to float the following Friday. This place — I eventually came to call it, “The Veil” — felt a lot like that at first. Only with less time needing to pee.

And only for the first ninety minutes.     

Panic hit me at the ninety-one minute mark. Where was I? Why was this happening to me? Was this Heaven? Purgatory?

“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone here?” No one answered because I had no voice, no vocal chords, no way of communicating. Even the vegetable in Johnny Got His Gun could create Morse Code by banging his head around. I had no head nor object against which to bang. I screamed for a bit, in a sad, silent, wholly unproductive kind of way. I sobbed, impressively, without eyes, ears or tears. For a while there, I even convinced myself I wasn’t really dead.

A coma, I thought. Or just a blackout, like after a night of heavy drinking.

Alas, my denial of death was to no avail. 

Fury came next; fiery, and with the precision of a stormtrooper. I cursed everything from God to the store that sold me the ladder, but ended each prostration with an undermining apology. I was always a pretty reasonable guy; cursing people out in the afterlife just didn’t sit well with me.

Example: Why would you do this to me, asshole!? (Unless you actually exist: In which case, thanks for the good times and not killing me with dysentery or bone cancer).

Example: There’s a special place in hell reserved for whoever designs a wobbly ladder! (Only, clearly, Hell isn’t what I thought it was and I shouldn’t have put the ladder on loose mulch anyway).

Alas, my anger over my death was to no avail.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I found myself falling into a well-documented pattern of behavior.

“Okay, okay,” I thought to The Veil. “You’ve got me in a corner here— well, a void, I guess. There’s no a-void-ing it…ha. Nothing? Okay. My point it, I’m here with you. If you could just give me back a single sense, I’ll stop complaining. It doesn’t even have to be a good one. Just smell. This place can smell like San Diego Comic-Con for all I care; just give me something! Please!”

There was no answer. No sudden aroma of anime cosplayers.

Alas, all my bargaining to a higher power was to no avail.

I got really bummed after that. I began to wonder whether I could snuff out what little of myself remained in this place. I tried to hold my breath, but that was difficult with no lungs or air. I tried to swallow my tongue but, you know…absence. That was a dark time. I spent many a moment concocting ways to shrug off my immortal coil.

Alas, depression over my plight was to no avail.

Now, the shrinks would tell you acceptance comes next; a prize of self-actualization at the center of the grief labyrinth. This is not so within The Veil, at least not to minds still turning. You see, I had really gotten it into my head about the Comic-Con thing. Call it a lack of imagination. I call it desperation.

 I imagined the sudden whine of microphone feedback, and distant laughter from the panel of a fandom I had never heard of. I imagined myself exploring the booths of artists, designers and voice-actors, jostled among a briny sea of unwashed bodies. Then, faintly at first, then in waves of glorious nausea, I could smell them! It was the most wonderful thing I had ever experienced. I followed the scent trail to a distant memory of my time there, in a period of my life long before mortgages, colonoscopies and Christmas lights.

My hallucination took shape, and something crashed into me.

“Sorry,” the man in the Boba Fett mask said, materializing into a mass of sarcastic t-shirt and Cheeto dust. It was love at first sight.

“Uh, no worries,” I said. I. Said. Speech and sound had returned, too! “No worries!” I repeated, yelling now. Boba Fett backed away, unwilling to explore whatever Sarlac pit I represented. His shirt offered me a parting bit of advice as his proverbial jet pack whisked him away.

“Success: Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person…so maybe calm down a little.”

Screw that, I thought, suddenly running through the crowds. They waxed and waned as I passed them, semi-existing, glitching. I didn’t care; it was enough just to run again! To feel again. A voice from behind me, familiar and friendly, solidified my hallucination and grounded me to the world I had put myself in.

“Pauly?”

I froze, turned, faced the group of three I had come here with the first time. Christ, they looked so young! Sal and Georgina, donned in the matching spandex of an obscure Korean kids cartoon, traded laughs at their new, ridiculous face paintings.

Three years from now, they will suffer a miscarriage; their relationship falls apart after that. 

Finn, ironically dressed as the dog in Adventure Time, calls my name again. I’m probably gaping like an idiot but can’t help it.

Cancer would claim my best friend less than a year from now, and I would spend the next three decades with a hole in my heart exactly his size.

Comic-con, 2015. He had known about the cancer by then, but wouldn’t share the news with us for nearly six months.

 “Yea? S-sorry. Thought I saw someone I recognized.”

“Well, snap out of it. The lovebirds are hungry and I refuse to be the third wheel to their creepy feeding rituals again.”

“I resent that,” Sal said, frowning through his newly painted Joker scars.

“How else is Sally supposed to know the airplane is coming in for a landing?” Georgina added, face adorned in matching scars. “Do you want an aviation catastrophe?”

“Kill me,” Finn deadpanned. I hid a cringe, focusing instead on the food element of his previous statement.

 Years before my fall, I had been forced by my doctor to cut cholesterol from my diet. That, unfortunately, axed from consumption my all-time favorite meal: The Sheetz double cheeseburger, layered with chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks. I know, shitty choice, and probably why my cholesterol was so high to begin with, but don’t knock it till you try it.

Now, Sheetz hadn’t reached San Diego by 2015, much less happened to be within walking distance of the convention center. Only, I craved it so badly. As if manifested through sheer will — which, of course, it had been — its famous red signage appeared outside the window closest to us.

“I could eat,” I said, nodding in that direction. “Sheetz, anyone?”

While we devoured our MTO monstrosities, I wondered what other unlikely objects and events I could hallucinate into existence. In the moment, surrounded by my friends from a lifetime ago, only one thing came to mind. Surprisingly, it wasn’t dorky or cringy. Even now, I pat myself on the back for what I chose as my first conscious shaping of The Veil.

Expelling the X-files theme I had come to associate with Finn more than the show itself, my friend’s phone rang.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, suddenly somber as he glimpsed the name on his caller ID. “Uh, excuse me a second. I have to take this.” Sal and Georgina registered his leaving but quickly returned to feeding each other mac n’ cheese bites. Finn was right, it was creepy.

Turning from the pair of weeby dweebs giving me the heebie-jeebies, I watched as Finn absorbed the news supplied to him from the other end of the line. His face distorted at first into a look of concern, then morphed into surprise, then jubilation. From a distance, I smiled along with him, knowing the content I imagined had become real.

At least, whatever was meant by real within The Veil. 

When he returned, he did so looking lighter, as though a weight had been removed from his shoulders.

“We ready to head back inside?” He beamed. “The Game of Thrones panel is starting soon and I wanna get good seats.”

“I can’t believe they killed off Jon Snow!” Georgina exclaimed as we collected our trash. “What’s the point in watching now?”

“They’re gonna bring him back,” Sal reassured her. “The books might not continue past this point but the show-runners know what they’re doing. Trust me, it’s only gonna get better from here.”

I hid my smile, thinking, if only that were the case, then stopped myself. I had ranted countless times after the show had finished, explaining in great detail how its ending could have been fixed. In this place, I realized, maybe it can be.

Fast-forward four years. I’m sitting in Sal and Georgina’s living room, watching their daughter, Harley, obliterate the block towers her parents construct for her. Finn and his boyfriend — a strapping lad named Joe he had met his junior year in art school — drop plates of fantasy-inspired cuisine onto TV trays for our merry party to dig into.

“This looks delicious!” the third addition to our band of dorks remarked, stealing a spoonful from my plate before digging into her own. In my life before The Veil, I had met Charlotte in my late thirties, after one failed marriage, three dogs, and over a dozen successful attempts to take down Christmas lights. In The Veil, I sought her out right away, and we now taught at the same school nearly a decade before we had the first time. We taught what we always had: Chemistry.

“Only the best for my besties,” Finn remarked, settling down with his own plate. Perfect timing, too: the famous Game of Thrones theme had just begun.

From my perspective, little happened on my journey between Comic-con and here. Driven by a fractured patchwork of memory and imagination, I walked from one event to another like they were rooms in a house under construction. A handful of disparate experiences served as departures from this — a personal launch aboard an earlier version of Space X’s Inspiration 4 mission, for example — but my core exposure to The Veil at this point remained focused on the life I knew... and the slight variations therein.   

“I’m so excited!” Georgina said, offering a strip of Ramsey Bolton-inspired potato skin toward her daughter’s already-open mouth. “This season has been a stroke of masterwork so far.” I didn’t need to hide my pride at her words; we were all smiling our heads off. This was truly the superior timeline.

“It’s just a shame what happened to those extras,” Finn said, extinguishing my revel. “I read they included a dedication at the end of this episode in their honor.” 

“What do you mean?” I heard myself asking. “What happened?”

Joe answered.“Didn’t you hear? They had bussed in thousands of people for the Night King’s siege of King’s Landing. One of the buses overturned en-route.”

“Forty dead,” Charlotte added. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it. It was all over the news.”  

I was silent. In my first life, the most news-worthy story besides disappointment in the show’s ending was the presence of a coffee cup in the season’s fourth episode. There definitely hadn’t been anything about a bus crash. 

“I would have prevented it,” I whispered, imagining no one had heard me.

The finale went off as I had expected; all in attendance at my little watch party loved the hell out of it. All, except the one who had made it happen. As I read the forty-two names listed in the in memoriam at the end of the episode, I wondered whether my actions were responsible for a butterfly effect, spawning hurricanes every time a new dream of mine flapped its wings.

I had no idea what The Veil had in store for me.

I spent that night scouring the internet for news articles about the incident. Apparently, the bus had been overdo on its inspection, and a faulty brake line had led to its collision with a supply truck at an intersection. The extras had been college students from Dubrovnik, the city in Croatia where the scenes of King’s Landing were filmed. They had been future nurses, tech specialists, accountants, and now they had no future at all. I, somehow, had robbed them of that. The people in this place felt as real as I did, as did their deaths.

I imagined the accident not happening; imagined the bus being inspected on time; imagined them with their families, Where’s Waldo-ing the battle scenes for glimpses of themselves and their undead friends.

Nothing changed.

Alas, re-imagining things that had already come to pass was to no avail.

Something else struck me while doom-scrolling through my news aggregator. There was a lot of tragedy in this new world of mine. I had changed things local to me with my God-like power, but the world around my hallucination had grown increasingly complex and confusing, filling the void between my decisions and perceptions.

Some of the stories I read were familiar to me: Fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral; Earthquake in the Philippines; School shootings in North Carolina and Colorado; Anti-abortion legislation in red states nationwide. Others were remarkably new and, as far as I could tell, unique to my veiled world. Stories like the gas-station market-domination of Sheetz and the resurgence of popularity in sarcastic t-shirts. Stories like the scrapping of the Artemis rocket line, and the crackdown on unhealthy eating habits in Wuhan, China.

There was, I realized, a logical self-consistence embedded within The Veil, and every decision I made tied me closer to a world increasingly beyond my control.

I decided to change that. If I was capable of shaping The Veil to my will, it was going to be shaped hard.

“Come to bed, hun,” Char whispered, kissing below my ear. Whatever decisions I was going to make, they could not interfere with the life I had here. I was happy in the world before this one, and that wasn’t going to change here.

“Coming.” 

 Big moves came in the days that followed.

From my first moment at Comic-con — though I didn’t realize it at the time — I had infused my world with the physics I had grown accustomed to. The laws of electromagnetism, motion and thermodynamics were the same; Temperatures and atmospheric composition were the same; The orbits of the sun, moon and planets were the same; Life, evolution, micro-bacteria, communication, pop-culture and all the minutia that I had known before had entered the world with me as byproducts.

Because of all I had transplanted with me, I had a template to work from, and lines to color inside of. I wasn’t going to fix every problem with Harry Potter shenanigans, but I could do something. I taught science in school, and the scientific method became my magic wand.

Cancer still existed in my world; it had only been Finn’s I imagined curing. This time, I imagined a breakthrough in gene editing, using novel procedures already in use in the first world I had known. I imagined that nuclear fusion was upon us, a distant reality perpetually a decade away in the real world. With every new discovery, the wealth of knowledge grew in my world. I read journals and papers written by people smarter than I was, and I learned from them. One-by-one, I imagined their far-fetched-but-technically-possible ideas into existence. Stem cells, artificial meat, space travel.

My world still had hatred and divisiveness, ignorance and gaping deficiencies, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine hope, goodwill, and emotional intelligence to combat them. After all, my world had those things to begin with, too.

Char and I started a family, something I never would have imagined in my previous life. I think about the one I had left behind sometimes, but she too was destined for The Veil. We all are. Maybe she imagined us being together again. Maybe she imagined Ryan Reynolds as her husband instead. Whatever she created for herself, I know she’s happy.

As I refuse to imagine immortality — and thus rob others of The Veil — I suppose I’ll die again someday, and start this craziness all over. I wonder whether I’d do things differently. I doubt it. At least, not by much. My world — the world you’re leaving — is pretty cool.

We’ve even discovered the best way to water petunias.

 We’ve arrived at last to the reason why I’m telling you this story— Well, the reason this pre-recorded version of me is telling you this story. See, you’re on death’s doorstep. The bell’s been rung and the knob’s a-turnin. I know that’s hard to hear. The realization that I — a dorky suburbanite who died taking down Christmas lights — kinda-sorta-maybe created you, is probably especially tough. Sorry if you were expecting something more interesting.

For what it’s worth, I often wonder whether my first life had spawned similarly from someone else’s imaginations. I try not to drive myself mad with the possible turtles-all-the-way-down scenario that thought implies. Sometimes, it’s enough just knowing you’re alive.

Fortunately, you’re one of the lucky few who teeter on the precipice before going all the way over. Not everyone gets an instruction manual of how to die. God knows I didn’t. You can avoid my pitfalls; avoid the cycle of relative sameness I imagine most of us dead folks find ourselves in. You can, if you choose to, be different. You can live in a world where gravity is purple and magic is real. The choice is yours. Soon, The Veil is going to be draped over you, too. I hope this message — this audiobook, of sorts — is helpful. I hope it gives you solace that the darkness isn’t going to last forever, and that the only thing separating you from the afterlife of your dreams are the limits of your imagination.

I don’t have all the answers, not even to the universe of my imaginings, but I hope I constructed for you at least a foundation, alas, to know a Veil.