Near Death by Glenn Cooper Page B

him like a cat stalking an unsuspecting sparrow. Waiting, waiting … then pouncing.
    One moment he was lying beside Jessie thinking about pulling her over for a kiss, and the next, his perspective violently flipped, in a way that ought to have alarmed him but didn’t.
    He’d been in this topsy-turvy world before—floating, hovering, observing, when he was a child—on the motorway.
    It was a perspective he’d often dreamed about. In his heart, he’d always held on to the belief that he’d experience it one more time, at the very least at the moment of death but preferably before.
    And here it was! Heady and exhilarating: a weightless perch for self-contemplation. He was hovering low enough to make out the pattern of blue veins in his own hands, geographic, like swollen rivers. Yet he was high enough to take in the entire bed, the whole room, its edges blurring as if seen through a fish-eye lens.
    He was drawn to himself. He knew
her
face,
her
body well enough; but seeing himself—not in a mirror or photobut rather the living, breathing man as others see him—was jarring. Unsettling. Fascinating.
    His eyes were closed and Jessie was whispering to him, touching his forehead, watching him breathe. “Alex, are you asleep?” she was saying. “Are you okay?”
    He wasn’t answering.
    I have a good face
, he thought, hovering.
Not handsome, not ugly … kind. It’s a kind face. I know what I’ve done. But I’m still a good man. And now it’s been worth it. For me. For Thomas. For those girls
.
    He steeled himself, and as Jessie awkwardly felt for his carotid pulse, it happened.
    A black fog rolled in and obscured the bed. Amorphous at first, it coalesced into a perfect circle and darkened into the blackest black he’d ever seen.
    He took a deep breath. He’d be traveling soon.
    And precisely at the moment his lungs filled to capacity the black disc became three-dimensional, a tunnel—and he was hurtling through it at seemingly unimaginable speed, though it felt frictionless, effortless. It wasn’t as if he were plunging head- or feetfirst; it felt more like skydiving, arms and legs outstretched, but without any physical forces playing upon his body. He was completely comfortable, stressless, fearless, his ears filled with thesoothing sound of rushing air, though he could feel no wind on his skin.
    The walls of the tunnel came alive with sparkling flashes that pulsed with blinding intensity then vanished, like light from the bellies of supercharged fireflies. There was no sense of directionality. He couldn’t tell if he was falling, rising, or moving laterally, and it occurred to him that he could even be stationary, the tunnel hurtling toward and around him. Time too was unfathomable. He blinked for what felt to be a second but was unsure if a moment had lapsed or an eternity.
    Finally, he saw what he was hoping to see: a pinpoint of steady, unwavering light ahead, slowly growing larger. He couldn’t tear his eyes away; it appeared so welcoming, a lighthouse beacon in an impossible fog, and when it grew man-sized he entered this pure disc of light and all movement stopped.
    He stood in a sea of whiteness so impenetrable he couldn’t make out his own appendages.
    He took a sharp breath to try to feel the whiteness against his throat, but it was neutral—not frosty or steamy—but without taste, unevocative.
    Then, as the whiteness became by increments paler and more translucent, he was able to see his legs and outstretched hands, and finally, a terrain.
    The scape was green and expansive, flat and limitless, monochromatic, matching the hue of a blade of spring grass. Yet it wasn’t grass, just color; and when he took a tentative first step, the terrain was neither firm nor soft. He felt nothing against his bare feet.
    Rising on the horizon from the green expanse was a field of faint blue whiteness, reminiscent of a pale dawn sky but too lifeless and unchanging for that, another expanse of tint without