Quantum Immortality

1971 Words

The headlights blinded her through the windshield, which was strange, because a moment ago it was a dark, gloomy forest and the steady heartbeat of a flashing red traffic light. Beads of rain that trickled down the windows like sweat. A blurry mirage of a road and her hands on the wheel, about to turn down the road that would lead her to sign the paperwork for her new job. Or perhaps she had already started to turn—Addie couldn’t remember. Now her hands were in her face, her head inches away from the dashboard. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what. The gearshift was in drive and yet everything was completely still, the kind of stillness that followed a funeral. She realized, her heartbeat rapidly increasing and stealing her breath, that she had crashed the car. Oh, God, no, no, no. A phantom hand reached for the gear shift and, rather ludicrously, put the car in park. The radio was still on, buzzing softly with intermittent static. The headlights had burned two holes in her eyes, like bruises, welling up with black and purple spots. The car door slowly opened, her feet wobbling unnaturally beneath her as she climbed out of the car and stared into the mouth of a massive Ford F 150. The man inside rolled down his window, shouting, but she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear anything through the roaring static that had suddenly blanketed her; she thought, perhaps, she was saying something: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

To the police: I think I hit my head.

She gazed distantly at the firemen as they swept the dismembered car parts off the road; her entire front fender, crinkled up like a piece of paper. “I’m fine,” she said, denying an ambulance, but the police officer shone a light in her eyes and promptly told her to sit down. The ambulance was on its way.

At the advice of the doctor, Addie was to spend the next six to eight months glued to her parents’ couch, making flowers out of play-dough and weaving friendship bracelets. No screens. The strangest thing was the absence of pain; it had felt like nothing, and yet evidence of it decorated her body—deep bruises that webbed around her knees, her pin-straight neck and stiff shoulders that couldn’t move more than a few inches. She imagined her brain had smacked against the inside of her skull, leaving a wet, bloody imprint that could never be scrubbed clean. She couldn’t think of anything for too long, or else the world would spin and throb, subduing her into a fitful sleep. At first she saw the accident in her dreams, over and over again, exactly as it happened. Her hands mysteriously appearing in front of her face, the black grooves of the dashboard, the headlights swarming her vision with spots. Then she witnessed herself die, her body thrown from her seat and smashing through the windshield, landing limply on the hood of the truck, and the man was not angry anymore; he was crying, screaming, terrified, blood trickling down the windows like rain.

The dreams slipped into the waking world. She dropped a glass of water on the floor after her father shut the front door a little too loudly, and started crying when it shattered. While sitting in the back seat of her parents’ van on the way to physio, every passing car was like a comet, or a nuke, zeroing in on its target. Though she couldn’t recall the feeling of the car crashing, every sudden shift or movement of the van sent her hands into the air, bracing for impact. She stared at her white-knuckled fingers, raised shakily before her eyes, and thought: here is the ghost of somebody who passed away in another life, come to haunt me.

The notion was ridiculous, she knew; it was just the concussion playing tricks on her. They had warned her that she would feel sudden inexplicable bouts of sadness, that she would have strange shadow thoughts, and see things that weren’t actually there. She just needed to rest. That night, she fell asleep on her mother’s lap as she lamented in groggy whispers: “I could have died, Mom, I could have died, what if that was how I died?” Her dream carried on as usual, with her flying through the windshield; however there was no man inside the truck. It was herself, unconscious, oblivious to her own death, waking up disorientated in another body, the same body, forgetting that she had just died seconds ago, a corpse that lingered in the vacuum of unconsciousness. Now the corpse was starting to rot. It was controlling her hands.

“You should start driving soon, before it’s too late,” Mom warned. “Before you get PTSD.” No way. She was wrong—somebody like Addie didn’t deserve to be traumatized, especially over something as trivial as a concussion and a couple bruises. PTSD was for war veterans and people who had been abused, for real car accidents on big highways going one hundred kilometres per hour. It was for mom, who had survived a semi-truck accident in her twenties but had broken her neck in three places, and lost the child she was carrying.

When nobody was home, Addie sat in the driver’s seat of the car she had crashed. The tow truck had dumped it in their back yard a few days after the accident. She curled her fingers around the wheel, trying to imagine herself driving without her head cracking open. It was no use. She climbed out of the vehicle, teetering, her face ashen. The forest behind their house loomed over her, encompassed by a thin crust of snow, the sky a sombre grey. She held her breath and set out toward the gloom of the woods. Her head was pounding, her neck and back slick with sweat. She hadn’t left the house in weeks—maybe a dose of fresh air would help sort out all these nightmares. Half-frozen leaves crunched beneath her feet as the twigs of nearby trees caught and pulled her hair. The setting sun glistened the snow in the hue of twilight, casting long, twisting shadows across the forest floor. Addie crossed her arms as a shiver reverberated down her spine. Just as she considered turning around, she gasped and stopped dead in her tracks. Somebody was staring at her. Their small white face appeared for only a second before slipping behind the cover of a tree too thin to conceal an entire body.

Addie stood, frozen in place, listening to the forest. She swore there had been the chittering of birds and rustling of undergrowth, a late autumn wind howling through the branches—now there was nothing. She backed up one small step, cringing at the sound that seemed to echo all around her. Something moved in the corner of her eye, but she was too scared to turn and witness it. The sun had almost set, dousing the forest in dreary darkness. She braved another step, only to stumble backward over a fallen log that she vaguely remembered stepping over. Addie crashed to the ground, screaming. She scrambled to her feet and started running, as fast as she possibly could, deeper into the gloom, the wind chasing after her, the trees blurring, the face staring. It was around every corner, simply looking at her, entirely expressionless. Addie couldn’t take it. Where was she? Where was the direction of the house? She threw herself into the nearest trough, crying loudly, hoping to bury her face in the snow, close her eyes and let whatever was following her just get it over with already. But there was already something there, firm and cold, lying beneath her.

It was an arm, surrounded by a scattered array of broken car parts: a rusty muffler, a broken mirror, a smashed headlight. The arm itself was slender and young, the bruised skin tinged the sickly grey of a headstone. Addie stood silently for a moment, covering her mouth with her hands. She turned and started walking again, much slower, her shallow breath warming her palm. Her palm? Palm, singular. Where was the other—

She struggled to tear off her snow-dusted jacket, letting it fall helplessly to the ground. Her left arm was gone.

Addie turned to go back to the trough, but was stopped by the face. It was in the ground this time, half-hidden by the overhang of the ditch where her arm lay. It was smiling.

She ran the other way.

It was night, the moon smothered by black clouds, the forest as silent and still as the evening of the accident. The only sound was Addie’s feet crashing through unseen brambles and dead ferns. She paused to catch her breath, wanting nothing more than for Mom to hold her close to her chest and lovingly stroke her hair, to tell her it was all a dream. Something touched her face, and she shrieked, falling back on her elbows. The moon peeked through the clouds just enough to illuminate a pale foot, hanging from the tree above her, embedded with shards of glass. She slowly looked down at her own sprawled out legs and nearly vomited from the sight.

“Addie? Addie, where are you?”

Mom!

“It’s getting late, are you coming home or not? Addie!”

Tears streamed down Addie’s cheeks as she soaked in the sound of her mother’s voice, yelling distantly from somewhere to the south. She tried to haul herself to a standing position, but she couldn’t make it more than one or two hops before falling over, so she resorted to crawling. She dragged herself across the forest floor, refusing to look behind her, where she knew it was watching; it was moving slowly and deliberately with her, waiting for her to turn around and look at it.

“Addie!”

“I’m coming!” Addie gasped, clawing her way home with numb, frost-bitten fingers and wet knees. Slowly but surely, she made it out of the forest and into her backyard, still not daring to look behind. She crawled half way across the lawn before realizing that her arm and foot had returned to her body. Addie raced to the front door, where she scrambled to lock it behind herself and nearly toppled inside, breathing hard, a jackhammer pummeling the inside of her head. She didn’t know what she was going to say to Mom, and she didn’t care—all she wanted was to hug her, as tightly as she possibly could.

But Mom wasn’t there.

Addie searched the entire house: the dimly lit bedroom, the bathroom, the weathered porch. Nobody was home. Surely she had been home, though, just a few moments ago? Maybe Addie took too long to escape the forest and Mom went looking for her elsewhere. I should call her, Addie figured, fishing her cell-phone out of a drawer.

“Hello?”

“Mom! I’m here, did you just leave?” Addie opened the front door and stood on the porch, peering down the driveway.

“What do you mean? I’ve been gone all day.”

“No, but… you were just here, calling me, weren’t you?”

“No, I’ve been at work. What’s going on?”

“Was anyone else here?”

“Not that I know of. Are you okay? Do you need me to come home?”

“I heard your voice calling me,” Addie said, slowly. “I was in the woods.”

The line was silent.

Addie looked back at the woods, where she saw herself, standing at the treeline. Her skin was bruised and grey, her face white, her limbs sprawled at odd angles. Glass was embedded in her arms and legs, blood splattering the hem of her shirt. She stared directly at Addie.

Mom’s quiet voice through the phone: “I’m coming home,” she said. “Don’t go into those woods again today.”